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CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 









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CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


RUSSELL HENRY STAFFORD 

MINISTER OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH IN BOSTON 




Willett } Clark Colby 

Chicago: 440 South Dearborn Street 

1928 



COPYRIGHT, 1928 , BY 


WILLETT, CLARK & COLBY 


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•STaCS 

Q.J> ^ 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


FEB 16 1928 


©Cl A1018992 (y 



Officers and Members 
of 

PILGRIM CONGREGATIONAL 
CHURCH 

in the 


City of Saint Louis 

in grateful acknowledgment of a 
happy pastorate 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Good Life. 1 

II. Can We Know God?.15 

III. God in Nature.26 

IV. In the Beginning.39 

V. Immanuel.50 

VI. The Still Small Voice.63 

VII. The Holy Trinity.75 

VIII. Light from the Scriptures .... 91 

IX. The Religion of Jesus.105 

X. The Beginning of the Gospel . . . 118 

XI. Slave or Free?.131 

XII. What is Sin?.143 

XIII. What is Temptation?.157 

XIV. Hunger.170 

XV. Self-Seeking.183 

XVI. No Compromise.191 

XVII. Non-Resistance.203 

XVIII. Not of This World.216 

XIX. Loyalty.229 

XX. Tolerance.242 


























) 




PREFACE 


The sermons which comprise this volume were 
delivered in Pilgrim Congregational Church, 
Saint Louis. They are designed to present a 
continuous view of life, faith, and duty, in vari¬ 
ous aspects mutually supplementary, considered 
in the light of Christian humanism. By this 
term is meant a primary preoccupation with the 
betterment of individuals and society in this 
world, and an approach to the high mysteries of 
God by building toward these summits upon a 
foundation of tested experience and its inescap¬ 
able implications. 

The positions defended in this book are not 
presented as definitively established. But they 
represent the author’s honest thought and con¬ 
victions thus far. The purpose of publication 
will be achieved if any readers are stimulated by 
these discussions to a new, serious and open- 
minded interest in the fundamental problems of 
man’s nature, source and hope. 

Russell Henry Stafford 

Old South Church in Boston, 

January, 1928. 












I 


THE GOOD LIFE 

Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy 
Spirit . . . ? —I Corinthians 6:19 

As at the Renaissance, so again in our day 
much of the best thinking is of the type known 
as humanism. Humanism is that type of thought 
which is interested in every phase of the life of 
mankind, but with reference to this world only. 
There are three main sources of the rise of con¬ 
temporary humanism. One is an altruistic ideal¬ 
ism, generously concerned for the improvement 
of living conditions—an effect of the quickening 
of the social consciousness. Another is the un¬ 
precedented progress of late of the applied 
sciences, making the adequate expression of this 
social idealism more feasible now than ever be¬ 
fore. The third is a feeling, prevalent in many 
minds dominated by scientific concepts, of uncer¬ 
tainty as to whether there be any other world 
than this, so that concerning other possible realms 
of being it is deemed unwise to speculate. 

The aims of humanism have never been better 

designated than in the title of a recent book by 
1 


2 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


the English philosopher, Mr. Bertrand Russell, 
“Education and the Good Life”—an excellent 
book, within the limitations of Mr. Russell’s 
naturalistic viewpoint. Humanism, seeking the 
Good Life through education, is a force for the 
right, so far as it goes, and has found religious 
expression in the Ethical Movement, under the 
inspiration of that true prophet of righteousness, 
Felix Adler. 

Now humanism has so many exponents con¬ 
spicuous for lucid intelligence and elevated mo¬ 
tive, that this type of thought must be attractive 
to every reflective person of our time, irrespective 
of his creed. But the Christian is disturbed as 
to the legitimacy of this interest because many 
humanists offer their views as an alternative to 
the Gospel. For they regard the Gospel as a 
system of metaphysics, chiefly concerned with 
the next world, and so belittling man’s life on 
earth. Now it is undoubtedly true that the 
Gospel has often been misrepresented to this ef¬ 
fect by zealous advocates of its claims. But we, 
within the fold of the Church, may well remind 
ourselves of a fact which outsiders are wont to 
overlook, namely, that the popular practice of 
Christianity has often departed far from the ex¬ 
ample and teachings of its founder. We shall, 
therefore, do well to study the life of our Lord 
from this standpoint, to inquire whether per- 


THE GOOD LIFE 


3 


chance Jesus himself may not have been more 
nearly in harmony with humanism than with the 
other worldliness of some of his avowed disciples. 
My own conclusion, upon making such a study, 
is that Jesus was a humanist; with this difference, 
that, while he was dominantly concerned with the 
life of mankind in this world, he nevertheless 
recognized consistently that heaven overarches 
the earth, giving warmth and light for earth-ex¬ 
perience. By this conviction Jesus the humanist 
was released from the benumbing frigidity of 
agnosticism, and in him all that is good and at¬ 
tractive in humanism was infused with assurance 
and buoyancy, with such a glow as is lamentably 
lacking in most mere humanists. 

Humanism, in search of the Good Life, is con¬ 
cerned, first, for the well-being of the body; for 
the body is the foundation of our life in this 
world. And it is often alleged that Christianity 
cares nothing for the body. Some of its dogmas 
would seem to indicate shame and contempt of 
physical processes. Some of its saints have 
hated the body, and hounded it into a premature 
grave by the repellent austerities of their asceti¬ 
cism. Granted; but no authorization for such 
contempt, not to say vilification, of the body, is 
to be found in Jesus. And surely he counts for 
more, in the religion he originated, than do any 
or all of his saints. 


4 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


For we find Jesus honoring the body by heal¬ 
ing the sick. How he healed them does not matter 
in this connection. He was at least concerned 
enough for health to be the enemy of disease, 
and sometimes to address himself to the restora¬ 
tion of men’s bodies before he gave heed to their 
souls. So the follower of Christ should be at one 
with the humanist in caring well for the body, to 
preserve its harmonious functioning, or to restore 
such functioning when it has been impaired. 

Further, beyond this negative tribute to the 
body in his regard for health, our Lord indicated 
by his own way of living, and by at least one 
telling phrase, a positive reverence for the body, 
such a reverence as would logically lead to de¬ 
liberate physical culture in quest of true beauty. 
Beauty does not consist, be it noted, in pulchri¬ 
tude of form and appearance, which the light- 
minded seek through the accessories of the toilet, 
costume and cosmetics; rather it is a matter of 
the vigorous and effective interplay of sound 
nerves and strong, flexible, resilient muscles; of 
firm and disciplined physique. Jesus himself 
was a carpenter; he had built up his body in boy¬ 
hood by hard and skilful labor. Through the 
period of his ministry, he kept fit by long pedes¬ 
trian journeys; probably few if any of us could 
equal Jesus as a walker, and in general endur¬ 
ance. And the words of our text, to the effect 


THE GOOD LIFE 


5 


that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit—re¬ 
member what the Temple stood for in Israel— 
are an echo of certain words of our Lord him¬ 
self about his death and resurrection: “Destroy 
this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” 
—an enigma which the evangelist explains by 
saying, “He spake of the temple of his body.” 
There is food for much meditation in these 
words. He who marks and digests their signifi¬ 
cance can hardly ever again fall into the perverse 
error of some Christians, of holding the body in 
light esteem. 

So far as we know, our Lord never witnessed 
an athletic contest. We know that the introduc¬ 
tion of Greek games at Jerusalem by Antiochus 
Epiphanes, a half-dozen generations before 
Jesus, scandalized the pious prudery of the He¬ 
brews. But we also know that Jesus judged all 
matters on their own merits, without subservi¬ 
ence to mere traditional piety; and that St. Paul, 
who at all points strove to keep his thinking in 
harmony with that of the Master, was fond of 
drawing illustrations for the religious life from 
races and the arena. So I do not doubt that 
Jesus would have heartily approved that pursuit 
of physical fitness through systematic exercise 
which is the source of our modern interest in ath¬ 
letics, and which has lately found engaging liter¬ 
ary expression in the wholesome muscular 


6 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


idealism of Mr. Hugh Walpole’s appealing hero, 
“Harmer John.” Of this I am sure, that the 
Christian who does not do his best to make and 
keep his body well and strong is an unworthy 
representative of him who termed the body a 
temple. 

A second element of the good life, as hu¬ 
manism conceives it, is acute and comprehensive 
capacity of intellect. And the humanists some¬ 
times declare that Christianity has been hostile 
to education; not indeed to formal instruction in 
its own dogmas, but to the free cultivation of the 
mentality. What is more, they are to a degree 
right in so maintaining. Every Christian, fa¬ 
miliar with the history of the Church, must feel 
embarrassment and confusion on account of the 
bigoted and reactionary reluctance of many 
Christian leaders through the centuries to accept 
new truths discovered by better minds than 
theirs. 

But, again, let us turn from Christians to 
Christ. We find, first, that Jesus was a teacher. 
That was the title by which he was known to 
men of his time: “The Teacher.” And, second, 
we find that he was by no means only a teacher 
of theology. To be sure, he did teach theology; 
no other has ever taught so clearly, convincingly 
and inspiringly the transcendental truths of 
God, duty and immortality, as he did. But per- 


THE GOOD LIFE 


7 


haps the reason why this is true is that his views 
of the Eternal spring not from absorption in 
technical problems touching the supernatural, 
but from a wide and genial interest in all phases 
of man’s life on earth, very like the interest for 
which humanism stands. He taught as much 
psychology and sociology as theology. He was 
always pointing out peculiarities of mental pro¬ 
cedure in diverse types and individuals, and in¬ 
doctrinating his disciples in what he had found 
to be the best ways of getting along with all sorts 
and conditions of men. And that he was a na¬ 
ture-lover no one can question who observes what 
varied and apt illustrations he drew for his dis¬ 
courses from birds, and flowers, and winds, and 
how often he strayed away alone, on mountain 
paths, to contemplate the sea, the sky, and the 
rolling hillsides, and through the veil of nature 
to commune with nature’s God. 

Jesus lived at a time when the dawn of natural 
science, at Athens three centuries earlier, had 
been overcast. His were a land and a people 
untouched by scientific thought. But from his 
love of nature, and his gift for terse formulation 
of ideas as exact as they were novel, it is surely 
not unfair to surmise that, had he lived in an en¬ 
vironment influenced by the scientific spirit of 
thorough and consecutive investigation of all 
natural phenomena, he would have been an en- 


8 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


thusiastic exponent of that spirit. Indeed, I 
hold that there is good reason to believe that the 
rebirth of science in Christendom in the fifteenth 
century, and its subsequent development, are 
due, not so much to the rediscovery of the 
achievements of Hellenic genius, usually 
credited with this result, as to a fresh apprecia¬ 
tion of Jesus’ fearlessness, candor and open- 
mindedness toward truth of every order. So it is 
as surprising as it is deplorable that agnostic 
humanists should be able to attack the Church 
as anti-scientific, and to cite evidences in support 
of this indictment among benighted literalist ad¬ 
herents of the Christian creeds in our own day. 
The true Christian—he who has not accepted cor¬ 
rect doctrines concerning the Saviour only, but 
has been kindled by his spirit of truth and love 
as well—will never admit that there is conflict be¬ 
tween science and religion, but will love and 
honor science as an instrument for promoting re¬ 
ligious ends, and for enlarging religious con¬ 
cepts. 

Upon a sound mind in a sound body, as its 
basis, the humanist seeks to establish an ethic, a 
way of living or scheme of morals, which shall 
result in an achievement worthy to be called 
“The Good Life.” And, as a first requirement 
for this ethic, the humanist is wont to insist that 
the individual must emancipate himself from the 


THE GOOD LIFE 


9 


mere conventionalities of customary behavior, in 
order to judge of right and wrong in any given 
situation primarily in terms of that situation, 
without bondage to precepts drawn from in¬ 
stances only loosely parallel. But it is fre¬ 
quently alleged that the Christian is above all 
others conventional in his notions of morality; 
that, indeed, he in effect defines righteousness as 
an inhuman excess of uncompromising obedience 
to general principles which to the unprejudiced 
observer would seem to be of doubtful cogency 
in many individual cases. 

Of course, that has been and is true of many 
Christians. But it was by no means true of 
Christ. What caused most of his troubles was 
his impatience of platitudes, his insistent moral 
realism, his searching of motives, his scrutiny of 
the results of conduct rather than of its conven¬ 
tional correctness, his undisguised contempt for 
orthodox legalism and casuistry. He did not 
hesitate, by the authority of this independent in¬ 
sight of his, to correct, amend, reverse and sup¬ 
plement Moses and the Prophets. No wonder 
that he was accused of dangerous impiety! He 
was, in this regard, a humanist of the first water. 

But it would be sadly misleading to convey 
the impression that humanism, in its renunciation 
of authoritarian ethics, sponsors anything like 
moral anarchy. Rather, it would define right- 


10 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


eousness as that course of procedure, with rela¬ 
tion to his own capacities, circumstances and 
associates, which for each individual is consonant 
with a clearly defined purpose for his individual 
career; with such a purpose, namely, as upon re¬ 
flection, and after the event, is not likely to oc¬ 
casion remorse, but will rather lead forward into 
increasing personal fulfillment duly adjusted to 
the needs, the rights and the aspirations of 
others. Now surely that is just the sort of moral 
requirement which Jesus lays upon his disciples. 
No teacher was ever more reluctant to make his 
views binding upon his students in such a way as 
to stultify their thinking by inducing servile ac¬ 
ceptance of his doctrine and obedience to his 
code. When he found a man whom he believed 
to be qualified to learn the higher lessons he had 
to impart, his one demand was, “Follow me”; 
that is, “Come live with me.” Living with him, 
his disciples learned to live by the inner light, 
and to abide by the consequences with a certain 
high score of aberrant external authority. They 
learned that lesson so well, that all but one of the 
eleven steadfast members of the inner circle are 
reported to have paid the extreme forfeit to man¬ 
made law for their God-given independence. 
By his invitation to join forces with him Jesus 
gave to these men, moreover, a purpose in life, 
as the nucleus of their several systems, which cor- 


THE GOOD LIFE 


11 


responds perfectly with the humanist ideal. For 
their purpose became to live as he lived: inter¬ 
ested in everything; well-disposed towards every 
one; enjoying a wholesome existence free of the 
cares of greed and lust, enriched by a vivid and 
expanding spiritual sensitivity: a life corre¬ 
sponding with the humanist ideal at its most ex¬ 
alted. 

So it is safe to say that Jesus was a humanist, 
and that his disciples, therefore, should likewise 
be humanists, in the sense of being primarily in¬ 
terested in the life of mankind in this world, its 
liberation from bondage of every sort, and its 
improvement in every way. But Jesus’ view of 
life was by no means limited, as is that of the 
humanist in the strict sense of the term, to this 
world in which he centered his interest. For he 
lived on earth by the light of heaven. So I want 
to raise the question, whether in fact the human¬ 
ists of our day are right in supposing that we can 
know nothing about any world but this, and that 
it would add nothing to our well-being if we 
could. I believe that they are wrong. I believe 
that we can and do know that our life is not 
earth-bound. Let me condense the logical 
grounds of this assurance—which, however, is in 
essence an intuition—into a syllogism. 

Man has within himself the impulse to create 
values—beauty, social harmony and the like— 


12 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


which transcend nature, as the physical senses 
perceive it. It is with the cultivation of this 
creative spiritual activity that humanism is 
chiefly concerned. 

Man himself, in whom this impulse arises, is a 
product and part of nature. 

Therefore, there must be in or behind nature 
that which corresponds to this impulse, to these 
values, which nature produces; a realm and 
energy of Infinite and Eternal Spirit, overarch¬ 
ing space and time. 

That syllogism carries irresistible conviction 
to me. It is the foundation for belief in God. 
It answers no questions as to the apparent dis¬ 
harmony between natural processes and this su¬ 
pernatural realm; so it leaves us in some sense 
agnostic. But not in the humanist sense; for at 
least we may say that we are positive as to the 
existence of another world than this—another 
world to which our souls here show their affinity, 
and into which it is reasonable to suppose, there¬ 
fore, that we shall some day wholly enter. 

So soon as we admit the compelling force of 
this logical perception, supplementing our sen¬ 
sual perceptions with the vision of life eternal, 
we find that humanism—a catholic and zestful 
interest in the life of mankind on earth for the 
purpose of our growth and its improvement— 
has now a firm ground beneath its aspirations, 


THE GOOD LIFE 


13 


so that we can trust ourselves to love our fellow- 
men and to seek beauty, truth and goodness— 
the Good Life—without any depressing suspi¬ 
cion that we are beguiling ourselves with a wist¬ 
ful artifice, a mere baseless human invention. 
And when we know that God is behind and in 
humanity, and humanity goes forward to God, 
then there come moments of mystic intuition in 
rapt contemplation of beauty, as at sunrise, or of 
goodness, as in the life of Jesus; moments in 
which we feel the Eternal, so that we begin to 
pray. And, as we pray, we learn to hope. The 
humanist thinks he thinks that probably nothing 
will remain of all he has become, an instant after 
his demise; so how can he hope, when all he has 
is the vain mockery of a mere transient dream of 
an insubstantial ideal? But the Christian hu¬ 
manist knows that he knows that to live well and 
fully here is an achievement which will carry over 
into life hereafter, a life indeed uncharted and 
baffling to our limited imagination, but giving 
abiding substance to everything of worth which 
we have found or made or dreamed of on the 
earth. How, then, can the Christian humanist 
help hoping, and being a better humanist now— 
coming closer to the Good Life—for the encour¬ 
agement of feeling that he shall be more than 
human when the earth is left behind? 

I am glad that most of the best thinking of 


14 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


our time is humanistic in its trend and emphasis. 
I hate other-worldliness, with its contempt for 
the flesh, its morbid yearnings for release from 
this glorious world where we now are, its narrow¬ 
ness of mind, its moral servility. But Jesus 
hated other-worldliness too. He wanted men to 
live the Good Life here and now. He showed 
them how. And he helps us to follow his ex¬ 
ample by leading us out of enervating agnosti¬ 
cism into a strong and stirring conviction that it 
is really worth while to lead the Good Life, be¬ 
cause the Good Life corresponds to the ascend¬ 
ent Power in the universe. So we ought all to 
be Christian humanists, building independent 
careers, of ethical consistency, in pursuit of 
worthy aims, upon the foundation of a sound 
mind in a sound body; repudiating dogmatism 
and all illiberality; and, through the very zest of 
living here at our best, feeling our way into har¬ 
mony of thought, purpose and soul with him who 
has given us our opportunities on earth, and will 
give us their full fruition in heaven. 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


What is truth? —St. John 18:38 

As he proffers this query, Pilate stands under 
the lens of history as the type of the effete Ro¬ 
man aristocrat, in the twilight of the ancient 
gods, when the moral energies of the governing 
classes of the world’s greatest empire were be¬ 
ing sapped by dreary uncertainty as to the 
meaning of life—any valid purpose in human 
effort. It is in this endemic disease of the Ro¬ 
man mind in the later stages of Rome’s dominion 
that the explanation is to be found of the down¬ 
fall of classic civilization, and the advent of the 
Dark Ages, rather than in those barbarian in¬ 
cursions commonly held responsible, but with 
which Rome of the heroic age, with a real faith 
however unenlightened, could beyond doubt have 
coped successfully. 

This dreary uncertainty is characteristic of 
thousands of minds among the privileged classes 
of the educated in our time. The forces of re¬ 
ligion err disastrously when they direct their 
attention upon differences of creed among be- 

15 


16 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


lievers, while the whole religious position is 
undermined in widening circles of our contempo¬ 
raries by a mood of agnosticism. The splendid 
accomplishments of the modern period will never 
dissolve in racial decline and retrogression 
through the triumph of any one school of faith 
over other schools; but disaster does surely im¬ 
pend unless all schools of faith combine in the 
energetic and effective presentation of that 
which is the common principle of them all, as 
against the growing sway of the paralysis of 
doubt as to the very being of God, which every 
honest observer must perceive to be the keynote 
of much recent thinking in widely influential 
quarters. 

There is infinite pathos, engaging our pro¬ 
found sympathy, in the state of mind of those in 
our time who decline to take either the affirma¬ 
tive or the negative side of the question as to an 
adequate and satisfying significance in human 
experience; who will neither say that there is a 
God nor that there is no God, but who feel con¬ 
strained to occupy what they sometimes describe 
as the middle position, inquiring simply, “Who 
knows?”—which is the same as Pilate’s query, 
“What is truth?” The tragic aspect of this 
middle position is that it cannot maintain itself 
as a rational mean between two extremes, but in 
practice is identified with the negative side of 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


17 


the question. He who says that he does not 
know whether there be a God or not, acts, of 
logical necessity, as though he were sure that 
there is no God. Thus agnosticism is a subtle 
form of atheism, and a peculiarly depressing 
form; for those who embrace this point of view 
are not likely to have even that crusading fervor 
against benighted superstitions, for the emanci¬ 
pation of human thought, which does frequently 
inspire avowed atheists to serve the cause of 
progress with a will, however short-sightedly 
and mistakenly as to their first premise. 

If a man does not feel sure whether there be a 
God or not, his emotional life must starve. The 
emotions most productive of personal happiness 
and creatively contributory to general welfare 
are love and hope. But love, in a world in which 
all things pass and our own personalities are pre¬ 
sumably doomed to early extinction, must be 
reduced to terms of the reproductive and gregari¬ 
ous instincts only, deprived of all putative 
higher significance; consequently, held in a meas¬ 
ure of contempt as an irrational outworking of 
our brute nature which must not be permitted 
to interfere with the cold requirements of reason 
as to advantageous adjustment to our environ¬ 
ment. And likewise, in such a world hope must 
be restricted to ends attainable in the present 
chapter of our existence only, while we are on the 


18 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


earth; though it is evident to every thinking man 
that there are no ends on earth worth hoping for 
with our essentially personal energies—which 
are spiritual and require eternity for their satis¬ 
faction—if eternity be not postulated. To be 
sure, some agnostics are not conscious of this 
fatal foreshortening of emotional perspective; 
but they can only overlook it by refusing to con¬ 
sider the implications of their intellectual posi¬ 
tion. Thus, in proportion to the thoroughness 
of his thinking, the man who is not sure of God 
is deprived, along with that certainty, of the joys 
which alone could give flavor to his being. 

Again, as it starves the emotions, agnosticism 
also arrests the will. For if a man have not the 
conviction that all his work fits in somehow with 
an inclusive plan, so that, however trivial it may 
appear, it is assured of final value, he will hardly 
care to make the most of his opportunities, to 
rise courageously over obstacles, to spur himself 
on in defiance of indolent inclinations to the per¬ 
formance of the manifold duties which life seems 
to lay upon him. For, of course, duty itself in 
such a case is without clear and inspiring au¬ 
thority. The theoretical agnostic who is a prac¬ 
tical atheist will always be asking, “Cui bono?” 
—that is, “What’s the use?” And such a view¬ 
point is but too likely to result in cynically re¬ 
signed idleness, painfully contrasting with that 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


19 


zestful and vigorous approach to the world’s 
business which alone can afford the individual 
reasonable self-respect, and contribute to the 
improvement of conditions affecting others also. 

Moreover—and perhaps even more lament¬ 
ably, since we have come to associate progress 
with that mastery over the material universe 
which comes through intimate knowledge of its 
processes—this middle position of radical uncer¬ 
tainty clips the wings of the imagination, which 
is the most indispensable servant of science, and 
thus curtails intellectual activity. It is by pro¬ 
jecting their fancy beyond the region of the as¬ 
certained to find a goal toward which research 
shall aim, that men of learning are led out into 
broadening areas of discernment as to the 
world’s problems and possibilities. But if all we 
can find at the utmost confines of space and time 
be but a machine so far as we can see, and any 
abiding value in this machine and its operations 
persistently elude our observation, there will 
presently appear to be no object worthy of our 
capacities to be served by further examination of 
an environment which tastes flat to our souls. 
To feel oneself shut in upon a little island of the 
known within vast seas of the hopelessly un¬ 
knowable is to lose all ambition to explore the 
seas and find new continents beyond them. 

Thus it is evident that the refusal, more or less 


20 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


reluctant, to endorse any certainty about the 
issues of being, which is the mental attitude of 
multitudes in our time, is, from the standpoint 
of all that we instinctively cherish, dreadfully un¬ 
desirable. And some of us have the courage to 
maintain that a position which starves the emo¬ 
tions, arrests the will, and deprives the intelli¬ 
gence of the impulse of hopeful curiosity must in 
the nature of things be false. But the agnostic 
will reply that we have no warrant for supposing 
that things must be as we wish they were. It 
may be unfortunate that we do not know the an¬ 
swer to the deeper questions about being which 
occur inevitably to our minds; but what right 
have we to invent answers for our own pleasure, 
and adopt them, in the absence of conclusive evi¬ 
dence that the answers thus invented are correct? 

That seems to be a fair challenge to our faith. 
But it would have more weight for me if our 
agnostic friends were able to maintain consist¬ 
ently that attitude of open-minded uncertainty 
which is their boast. As we have already seen, 
however, in practice they usually endorse the 
negative side of the basic question whether or not 
there be a God. And in theory likewise they are 
in most instances guilty of self-contradiction. 
For when a man says, “I do not know,” we are 
moved to ask him, “Why do you not look into 
the matter and find out?” And to this, in nine 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


21 


cases out of ten, the agnostic will reply: “Be¬ 
cause I cannot know; we confront the unknow¬ 
able at the frontiers of our immediate experi¬ 
ence; our utmost endeavors will not suffice to 
scrutinize it.” But one already knows a good 
deal about the Unknowable when one knows that 
it is indeed unknowable! This amounts to a pos¬ 
itive theory of what philosophers call the Abso¬ 
lute; namely, “The Absolute is that which men 
cannot know.” Now there is nothing truly ag¬ 
nostic about this middle position as it is thus de¬ 
fined by many who occupy it. It becomes simply 
a rival assertion, in affirmative terms, to the re¬ 
ligious assertion that God is an Infinite Person; 
to the Christian assertion that God is a loving 
Father. And so soon as the issue is thus defined 
as a competition among metaphysical concepts, 
no Christian need fear but that his belief will win 
the day. 

Self-contradictory though the agnostic view 
be, yet there must be some ground of appeal in it 
to account for its wide prevalence among 
thoughtful men today. That ground is, as I 
maintain, a misunderstanding as to what con¬ 
stitutes knowledge. The agnostic is usually a 
man whose training has been predominantly 
scientific. Science moves primarily within the 
realm of those aspects of being which we perceive 
through the five physical senses. Scientific 


22 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


knowledge is therefore circumscribed within 
matter; and the man whose thought has princi¬ 
pally been within scientific categories is inclined, 
consequently, to limit knowledge to that which 
is susceptible of sensible proof. Yet science it¬ 
self, when, under the guidance of facts already 
ascertained, it devises an hypothesis going be¬ 
yond those facts to account for them, does move 
out from the existing frontiers of the sense-world 
into the region of “moral certainty:” a different 
kind of knowledge, arrived at by logic rather 
than directly by observation, and yet knowledge 
nevertheless. The scientist is as certain about 
various facts having to do with the structure of 
the atom and with the general course of the de¬ 
velopment of the universe and of life, as though 
he had actually seen them; although this, of 
course, he has not done. So the agnostic makes 
a grievous mistake when he supposes, under the 
influence of the scientific habit, that we can be 
certain of nothing beyond our immediate experi¬ 
ence. As a matter of fact, we are all certain of 
many things which are interpretations of ex¬ 
perience rather than bare sense-impressions. 
We are certain of beauty, and of love, and of 
principle, though we have never seen or handled 
them. And religion does no more than to pro¬ 
pose an hypothesis, if you like to call it that, 
which includes all the facts attested by the 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


23 


senses, and interprets them in terms of meaning 
which alone can meet the demands of the facts 
themselves, and their obvious and incontrovert¬ 
ible interdependence. Christian faith states, in 
essence, that conscious purpose is in control of 
the universe, and that in quality or character 
this conscious purpose is like Jesus. All subtle¬ 
ties of the competitive creeds of Christendom are 
but elaborations of that central theme. And that 
theme contributes an hypothesis to which we are 
led by the facts of life themselves; an hypothesis 
which we cannot prove in any laboratory, but 
without which all laboratory proofs are denuded 
of value; and which does therefore constitute a 
definite certainty for all minds which weigh and 
test it fairly. 

So those of our contemporaries are mistaken 
who suffer from the paralysis of doubt about 
God, leading in practice to denial of Him, be¬ 
cause we cannot take His dimensions on any 
physical scale, or analyze His substance in any 
test-tube. We are positive about many things in 
everyday life, whatever our academic conclu¬ 
sions may be, which are equally undemonstrable 
in a scientific sense. But when a man adopts the 
Christian hypothesis—which has been better 
stated in that glowing phrase, 4 ‘God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself”— 
and proceeds to act as though it were true, then 


24 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


he finds that, like every other sound induction, it 
works. And his assurance mounts through de¬ 
gree after degree of certainty until presently he 
can say, with no leap in the dark void of mere 
guess-work, nor any insincerity whatever, “I 
know that my Redeemer liveth!” When a man 
reaches that point, love and hope receive a new 
charter; his will is energized for new conquests; 
and his intelligence becomes the willing and 
acute instrument of new discoveries ministering 
to the welfare of his kind. 

It is not in the heart of any true Christian to 
condemn or to scorn the unfortunate people who 
think that God cannot be known. But it is the 
great task of the Church, in ministry to the 
awakened mind of the world, so to re-interpret 
the eternal truths of our faith as to articulate 
them with the peculiar mental processes of the 
twentieth century, and to explain acceptably in 
their terms that deep assurance of abiding value 
and high purpose in life which is native to the 
human breast, and is defined by our religion. 
We sympathize with all who doubt. But with 
courage and without apology we educated 
Christians must persuasively reiterate our affir¬ 
mations that God is; and that He is like our 
blessed Lord; and that life is only worth the 
trouble it costs when it is lived in harmony with 
the divine character thus revealed. If these be 


CAN WE KNOW GOD? 


25 


assumptions, they are far more reasonable as¬ 
sumptions than the self-contradictory dogma of 
the Unknowable; so reasonable, indeed, that we 
hold them to be matters of genuine knowledge. 
And unless we win the doubters of our time to a 
fresh and inexpugnable conviction of celestial 
realities, social degradation must ensue upon the 
theoretic doubts and practical atheism of our age. 

Confronting each other through the centuries, 
and still today, stand Pilate, pitiable for the 
question on his lips, despite his insignia of mag¬ 
istracy: a symbol of sullen infamy presaging 
social downfall; and Jesus, a prisoner at the bar, 
yet kingly despite his man-inflicted humiliations, 
and the incarnate promise of humane progress 
through virile faith in divine Providence. Where 
lies the truth, as between these two? You and 
I know. It is for us to lead the doubting toward 
participation in our assurance, that it may be 
well with them and with the future of civilization. 


Ill 


GOD IN NATURE 

The earth is full of the lovinghindness of the Lord. 

—Psalm 33:5b 

Everybody with a healthy mind realizes that 
we live in a brilliant and glorious world, the won¬ 
ders of which invite us to investigate every de¬ 
partment of it which may be accessible to our 
curiosity. It is this appreciation which is respon¬ 
sible for the sense of adventure which has im¬ 
pelled men to explore the surface of the earth, 
and thereby open up vast regions of interest to 
our minds, and for colonization and commercial 
exploitation. But this sense of adventure is no 
less in evidence as the motive for scientific ob¬ 
servations of the universe. From the time when 
men first looked up at the stars as at lamps hung 
by night in the sky for the earth’s illumination, 
through the period when dawning perception of 
the true nature of the stellar display led men to 
feel that through their telescopes they were ob¬ 
serving mere outlying provinces of the cosmos 
beyond our central planet, until our own day, 
when we know that the earth is not the center but 
26 


GOD IN NATURE 


27 


a speck of dust on the periphery of infinitude, it 
has been the appreciation of the enticing marvels 
of the world which has led to such investigation. 
And this is equally true of the reverse type of 
observation, in which men have progressed from 
casual remark upon those organisms and geo¬ 
logic details which are of minute mass, until and 
through the era of the microscope, opening up 
new realms of bewildering complexity in the in¬ 
finitesimal to the astonished and enraptured eye 
of the human observer. 

I am convinced, moreover, that the develop¬ 
ment of philosophy is due, no less than are the 
exploration of the earth’s surface and the scien¬ 
tific analysis of the world’s elements and consti¬ 
tution, to a feeling of the enchanting splendor 
of our material environment, challenging our 
minds to attempt to comprehend its total and 
ultimate significance. As an astronomer need 
never go farther from his own house than his ob¬ 
servatory to behold the wide domains of the 
skies, so stay-at-home philosophers—like Im¬ 
manuel Kant, who never left the little German 
province of his birth—have nevertheless, by pro¬ 
jecting their minds upon the deepest problems of 
existence, been explorers of the world, as truly 
as are they who go down to the sea in ships and 
traverse jungles and deserts on far continents. 

When we examine external nature, which are 


28 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


those of its attributes which most impress our 
imagination? First, power. We cannot but 
stand in awe of the mighty forces of nature, not 
only when they are dramatically displayed in 
those convulsions of tempest and earthquake to 
which the earth is subject, but also, upon reflec¬ 
tive view, when we contemplate them in equable 
counterpoise, as they hold the seasons on their 
course and swing the planets in their orbits. 

Second, precision. The delicacy of adjust¬ 
ments throughout the universe, whereby, for 
instance, a solar eclipse can be predicted with in¬ 
fallible accuracy, to the second, centuries before 
its occurrence; while, on the diminutive scale 
which balances these colossal phenomena, the 
form of the snow crystal is a marvel of intricate 
and unmarred symmetry, and even the structure 
of the atom is found to be a miniature of the uni¬ 
verse, and through all the range between the 
atom and the star—this delicacy passes the 
power of the mind fully to conceive, and staggers 
the imagination of the most meticulous artist 
among us. In this precision of all cosmic proc¬ 
esses is to be found an overwhelming indication 
that intelligence presides over them all, small and 
great. It is impossible to suppose that accident, 
productive only of chaos within our experience, 
could on the immeasurably extended scale of the 
universe produce exact and irrefragable order. 


GOD IN NATURE 


29 


Third, unity. The primitive mind views na¬ 
ture as a realm of many competing powers. 
There is much in nature, at a casual glance, to 
justify this view. Nevertheless, the further we 
explore, the more extensively and intensively we 
investigate, the more indisputable does it be¬ 
come that all that is constitutes a continuous 
whole—one creation, or enterprise, if you please, 
and one only—corresponding, in the strangest 
fashion, yet demonstrably, to that demand for a 
universe which is born in us from the essential 
unity of each personality despite the diversities 
of its moods and capacities. 

Might, intelligence, continuity—these are 
characteristics of the world which cannot escape 
the eye of the rational and penetrating observer. 
But these do not meet our crying desire for a 
quality in the universe satisfying our hearts and 
affording sure sanction for our ideals. The 
Psalmist exclaimed, “The earth is full of the lov¬ 
ingkindness of the Lord.” Some loving-kind¬ 
ness there obviously is, to be sure, in the earth, 
and in its immeasurable environment, the uni¬ 
verse ; but how much else would there seem to be 
beside! The same garden which yields us fruits 
and flowers brings forth poisons and harbors the 
snake. The same sky which radiates benignity 
upon us on a calm summer day is now and again 
darkened, and filled with the blind fury of deso- 


30 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


lating storm. The same sea which in one mood 
lulls us to dreamy rest on its placid bosom, in 
another surges angrily to overwhelm our lives in 
cold and forlorn destruction. The very earth 
which seems so solid beneath our feet sometimes 
trembles, dances and yawns beneath us, tum¬ 
bling our staunchest structures into dust. If we 
must judge of the Lord—that is, of the first 
cause of all things; that is, of the moral quality 
inherent in all things—by the revelations of outer 
nature alone, then I fear we must reluctantly 
confess that we cannot believe Him to be kind 
with any degree of consistency, but must at best 
conceive of Him as of uncertain temper, a way¬ 
ward monarch alternating aimlessly between se¬ 
rene mercy and horrible violence. 

And yet I agree with the Psalmist: I enjoy an 
unwavering conviction that God—that is, the 
Intelligence which is the source and governor of 
all being—is utterly good and unchangeably 
kind. The Psalmist must have been aware, as 
we are, of those terrifying paroxysms of physical 
nature which seem to deny this postulate of his 
faith and ours. He must have heard thunder, 
and seen the lightning strike; he lived in a land 
of tempests, drouth and earthquake, on the bor¬ 
der of the tortured and treacherous Mediter¬ 
ranean. What, then, was the ground of his faith 
in the loving-kindness of the Lord? What is the 


GOD IN NATURE 


31 


ground of ours? Not a detached judgment upon 
the findings of our five senses as though these 
were final evidence of truth; but a conviction in¬ 
herent in our very being, and which all men 
share who consent to continue to live: the inner 
and inescapable assurance, in spite of all perils 
and catastrophes which might hint the contrary, 
that life is worth living. If you believe that life 
is worth living, that means that you believe that 
life is good, and therefore that He is good who 
gives you life. 

Not one of us can prove that this conviction is 
true. But every one of us shares it. It consti¬ 
tutes the great assumption that lies at the root of 
human life itself, and consequently of all human 
thought which has value and is destined to en¬ 
dure. Sometimes a pessimistic philosopher 
arises to assure us that this subjective faith in the 
value of life is a mere impression on our minds 
of an irrational vital urge in our physical or¬ 
ganisms. But it is to be noted that even such 
philosophers usually continue to live, and con¬ 
tend in behalf of their theories with a vigor 
which is in itself a strong, albeit perverse, testi¬ 
mony that they hold it to be tremendously worth 
while to know the truth and to share it with 
others; in other words, they cannot get away 
from the conviction which they impugn. 

But, if there be any meaning at all in the con- 


32 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


cept of truth, that must be true which is thus in¬ 
eradicable from our minds. So—call it a gamble 
if you will; at least the odds are on my side—I 
believe with all my heart that life is good. And 
so do you. And that assumption is the starting 
point for trust in the loving-kindness of the 
Lord. If we take this much for granted, and 
think from this point forward by logical steps, 
we can arrive at nothing less than that doctrine 
of God—of the One who is not only almighty 
but also all-merciful—in which only can our 
hearts find rest. 

Thus it is not through our observation of ex¬ 
ternal nature, but rather by an inner light, that 
we see God. The name for that inner light is 
faith; and it is present at least in rudiment in 
every human mind. The next step in faith, be¬ 
yond acceptance of the fact of God, is to expect 
to find His likeness in human nature at its best. 
We, to whom the gospel has come, are privileged 
to know human nature at its best in the person 
of Christ Jesus our Lord. In him whom the 
ages acclaim as the noblest of the sons of earth, 
we are assured by faith that we contemplate a 
transcript of the character of God in terms with¬ 
in the scope of our comprehension. And that co¬ 
incides with what our Lord claims for himself. 
So, knowing him, we are confident that we know 
the very heart of the Eternal; that we have a 


GOD IN NATURE 


33 


revelation in personal terms, far surpassing His 
manifestations in the outer order, of the one 
omnipotent Mind who indwells the universe; 
and who must be good, if indeed life be, as we 
believe, worth living. 

So as Christians we bring to our search for 
God in nature this criterion of His essential 
quality, derived from spiritual rather than from 
material sources. In other words, we know 
God independently of nature, so that we know 
what to look for when we look in nature for Him. 
And that transforms our outlook upon the uni¬ 
verse from one of terror of its apparent ruth¬ 
lessness toward us to one of appreciation for all 
its fair aspects, while we overlook and in some 
sort discount its severer aspects as phases of re¬ 
ality for which we cannot as yet account, but 
which must somehow surely be overruled and 
used to fit in as elements in the outworking of the 
cosmic providence of divine love. 

From this point of view, the tragedies of na¬ 
ture are not, of course, hidden from us. But a 
number of considerations justify us in our atti¬ 
tude of untroubled agnosticism as to their real 
significance. First, by analyzing our physical 
senses, through which we note the outer order, 
we have discovered their limitations. They re¬ 
spond only to certain definitely limited ranges 
of ethereal vibration. There may be many other 


34 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ranges of which we can take no cognizance and 
have no concept. 

Second, by analysis of our minds we have dis¬ 
covered the limitations of our conceptual range. 
We perceive space, in which the outer order is 
extended, in three dimensions only—height, 
breadth and length. It is at least an interesting 
speculation, and perhaps points toward the solu¬ 
tion of many problems beside that of natural 
evil, as to whether, in space as in mathematics, 
there may not be several, and perhaps many, 
other dimensions, of the nature of which we can 
have no idea whatever; so that we must perforce 
take an extremely limited view of nature, and 
withhold our ethical judgment upon it because 
of our insuperable ignorance at the terrestrial 
stage of our personal development. 

Corresponding to these criticisms of our sen¬ 
sible and conceptual capacities is the doctrine of 
all idealists since Plato, that what we call matter 
is but a projection of our mental state; in which 
case the disasters of time and space are to be re¬ 
garded simply as manifestations of the errors of 
our finite minds rather than as real factors in 
the world as God made and knows it. 

Again, because we know so little, we cannot 
see, save from below, the pattern God is weaving 
in the looms of time; and no pattern can be 
judged correctly from its under side. This 


GOD IN NATURE 


35 


figure suggests, moreover, that creation may still 
be under way, rather than long since completed 
—a suggestion borne out by many findings of 
the natural sciences. Then what we call life’s 
pains and troubles may be but litter and noise of 
the passing disorder of a building process. 

And, finally, it is certain that if, with our pres¬ 
ent mental constitution, we were exposed to no 
dangers, we should lack incentive to improve our 
control over our environment and should con¬ 
sequently suffer arrest instead of achieving 
growth. If there were no storms or winter, there 
would be no houses; but the dawn of civilization 
occurred when men built the first house. If 
there were no lightning, we should not have dis¬ 
covered electricity, and harnessed it to our proj¬ 
ects of economic betterment. 

So you see that there are many considerations 
which justify us in paying very little attention to 
what seems to us to be the dark side of nature; in 
merely noting it, and confessing that we cannot 
account for it as yet, and then leaving it with 
God, who does understand it; and in whom we 
trust because we see Him, by the inner light of 
faith, as a Being of infinite goodness, though our 
observation of the outer order teaches us no more 
than that He is one, that He is intelligent, and 
that He is almighty. This spiritual conviction, 
however, will lead us inevitably in reverent en- 


36 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


thusiasm to look for as many evidences of God as 
we can find in nature, and to dwell with grat¬ 
itude upon those aspects of His being which are 
clearly made manifest to us there, along with so 
much we cannot fathom. 

“The earth is full of the lovingkindness of 
the Lord!” First, His goodness—His open hand 
of provision and aid for His children in this 
region of finite discipline. Have you been in the 
country at the spring of the year, and seen the 
fields green with the first shoots of the crops out 
of the brown loam? There surely is displayed 
the loving-kindness of God, who gives us year 
after year food for our bodies by sending the 
cyclic visitations of the seasons and the caresses 
of the rain and sun; and from whom come also, 
out of His treasuries in the earth, the raw mate¬ 
rials of all our industries, whereby we are not 
only fed but clothed and sheltered, and equipped 
for ever more extensive conquest over our sur¬ 
roundings, and ever larger life of the spirit as 
well. 

Second, there is His truth, His dependability. 
I should think every scientist would love God; 
for the scientists are they who most appreciate, 
because they most depend upon, the absolute con¬ 
sistency of the laws of God in nature. Take the 
simplest of all rules, in the most accessible of all 
sciences: 2 plus 2 equals 4. That holds true 


GOD IN NATURE 


37 


everywhere and all the time. We might, I sup¬ 
pose, have been put into a world where 2 plus 2 
would equal 3 yesterday and 5 tomorrow; it is of 
the loving-kindness of God that these things do 
not vary, so that we have something to count 
upon. Morning will come tomorrow. Spring 
will return next year. The earth will not fall 
into the sun. And the same God who is thus for¬ 
ever, so to speak, guaranteeing weights and 
measures, is also forever loving us, as our Lord 
loved his fellow men. 

And, finally and inexhaustibly, there is the 
beauty of the world, in demonstration of God’s 
loving-kindness. Ought I to, try to wax elo¬ 
quent about the beauty of nature? But what 
good could any eloquence do? If you do not see 
this beauty for yourself, I cannot reveal it to 
you. If you do see it for yourself, you ought to 
be ashamed ever to let a day go by without 
thanking God for His glory, revealed in sunlight 
and starlight, trees and streams, mountains and 
prairies. 

If we really believe in God, we shall not worry 
about those aspects of nature which we cannot 
understand. We shall be looking for and dwell¬ 
ing gratefully upon the good things in life, be¬ 
cause in them at least we know that we see the 
very likeness of His character, the clear forth- 
showing of His good will toward us. We shall. 


38 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


moreover, cultivate the habit of seeing and ap¬ 
preciating the goodness in life as a gift from 
God’s generous hand, in order that we may render 
ever more and more acute our spiritual sensibili¬ 
ties, to be prepared for that* later period in the 
pilgrimage of our souls when we shall advance 
beyond our present limitations into fuller per¬ 
ception of the real universe; when we shall know 
it in all its dimensions through and through, and 
in the cosmos thus discerned shall doubtless be¬ 
hold without shadow the glorious reflection of 
God’s heart of infinite love, which is now made 
known to us in earthly terms in the life and 
ministry of our blessed Redeemer. 


IV 


IN THE BEGINNING 

In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth. — Genesis 1:1 

This account of the creation—which, though 
the later in date of composition, stands first in 
order of the two with which the book of Genesis 
opens—purports to be an historical narrative. 
But the man who wrote it was clearly a poet. So 
it is legitimate to suppose that, by the phrase “in 
the beginning,” beyond its obvious primary ref¬ 
erence to time, he intended to convey to reflective 
readers a reference also to logical sequence: a 
suggestion for the focusing of their interest; an 
invitation to attend to first principles, to turn 
away from the confusing details of human ex¬ 
perience, and consider it in its broad bearings 
and sustaining outline. 

This poet, with his deep view of reality, can 
hardly have been unaware that many familiar 
phenomena seem to belie his central assertion that 
God is the spring of all existence. But his aim 
was to convey so positive an assurance as to this 
first principle that secondary matters seeming to 

39 


40 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


conflict with it would appear, in the corrected 
perspective of the certainty of divine purpose in 
the universe, as problems only for our limited 
understanding, which we are to assume to be com¬ 
prehended and solved within the all-inclusive 
synthesis of the Infinite Mind which he postu¬ 
lates. 

The theory of creation, which our poet asserts 
or assumes, is fraught with an apparent difficulty. 
For it seems to mean the making of something 
out of nothing; and that is so without parallel 
in our experience as to awaken our incredulity. 
But the notion that God made an alien substance, 
matter, by the mere exercise of His will—conjur¬ 
ing it, as it were, from a void—involves a naive 
dualism of spirit and matter which, though per¬ 
sistent in popular thinking, can hardly sustain 
critical examination. If, as recent scientific in¬ 
vestigations of the nature of matter would seem 
to establish, matter be in the last analysis energy; 
and if, under the persuasion of a belief in God 
derived from considerations more penetrating 
than the observations of science, we hold that God 
is the cardinal and all-pervasive energy of the 
universe; then creation becomes, not the making 
of something out of nothing, but a specific pur¬ 
poseful differentiation of pre-existent energy. 
And the doctrine in this form presents no serious 
obstacle to our acceptance of it. 


IN THE BEGINNING 


41 


But it was certainly not in the interest of any 
theory about creation, as a philosophical concept 
of the mode in which the world came to be, that 
this poet and seer composed his sublime and im¬ 
posing epic of first things. Rather, he fashioned 
this epic to be a shrine, captivating to the imagi¬ 
nation, for his glorious and inspiring statement 
of the first principle, behind and in all things: 
God; that is, a supreme constructive Intelligence, 
producing and conserving spiritual values; in 
other words, goodness as the conscious purpose of 
all being. 

This doctrine, that the world—not the earth 
only, but the whole universe, in which the earth, 
as we now know, is but as a grain of dust—is in 
the last analysis attributable to and governed by 
the holy will of an infinite Intelligence, is sup¬ 
ported in the realm of reason by four classical 
propositions known as the cosmological, the teleo¬ 
logical, the ontological and the moral arguments. 
There is no need in the present context to discuss 
these arguments; but a statement is in order as 
to how far they seem to me to suffice for the satis¬ 
faction of our intellects. I do not think that 
severally or collectively they prove conclusively 
that God is; that is to say, they do not demon¬ 
strate His being in such a way as to render it im¬ 
possible for a rational and informed mind to 
question it. Nevertheless, these arguments sat- 


42 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


isfy the reason, in that they attest an overwhelm¬ 
ing probability, a probability so sweeping that 
far more credulity is required to doubt the truth 
to which it witnesses than to accept it. And, in¬ 
asmuch as most of our decisions, after all, in the 
practical affairs of life, must be rendered upon 
the basis of probability, while even the sciences 
are hedged about with interrogations as yet un¬ 
answerable, one may justly maintain that a well- 
balanced mind would be constrained to believe 
in God on rational grounds, even if all other 
grounds were lacking. 

But belief in God does not commonly arise 
from rational considerations. It goes so much 
deeper than that, that the sort of belief which de¬ 
pends upon logic for its sole support, as some 
philosophers hold it, is wont to be a cold, joyless 
and inert opinion, without the dynamic quality 
which pertains to real faith. It is rather by love 
of God Incarnate, as we behold Him in the good¬ 
ness of others, and above all in the character of 
Jesus Christ, and with the subjective confirma¬ 
tion which the still small voice of God affords in 
the many tones of conscience within our own 
breasts, that we achieve a faith which is no mere 
barren hypothesis but a vital and transforming 
energy. Holding this faith, then, on the grounds 
named, and with gratitude for the auxiliary sup¬ 
port afforded to our conviction by the compelling 


IN THE BEGINNING 


43 


probability of the logical arguments for God’s 
being, we are now to look for indications of God’s 
presence in the outer order, the world of things. 

Be it noted, however, that we are not to be dis¬ 
turbed by observing that the values which are 
subsumed by hypothesis in God’s being are not 
discernible uniformly in all phases of our earthly 
experience. For we are not testing our faith by 
the world, but bringing our faith to the world, 
and will therefore disregard the incongruous 
aspects of life on earth, constituting collectively 
the problem of evil, as beyond our present com¬ 
prehension, but surely understood and provided 
for by our Creator. 

One climactic manifestation of divine goodness 
is especially to be expected in the world, if indeed 
goodness be the conscious purpose of all being; 
namely, progress. Here we touch a quivering 
nerve of current controversy. Is there progress 
in this world of ours? The problem posed thus 
baldly is not susceptible of a simple answer. It 
requires to be analyzed into three elements. First, 
if we ask if there be progress up to the level of 
humanity, the answer is in the affirmative. The 
whole story of evolution is of successive change 
for the better; with many deviations, with fre¬ 
quent arrests and failures, with an amount of 
wastage on the way which at first glance seems 
appalling, but nevertheless steadily in the direc- 


44 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


tion of the achievement of consciousness, and the 
consequent appreciation and expression of spirit¬ 
ual values: from the inorganic to the organic; 
in the organic, from the plant to the animal; in 
the animal, from the invertebrate to the verte¬ 
brate; in the vertebrate, from the rude forms 
small and great of prehistoric time to homo 
sapiens. The natural sciences, in their review 
of the past, tell the story of one increasing pur¬ 
pose, a purpose worthy of God. 

Second, is there progress in the social relations 
of mankind? No student of history or of soci¬ 
ology can fail to respond to this question also in 
the affirmative. From the cave-dweller in the 
primeval forest to the apartment-dweller in the 
modern city may seem to the cynic a change with¬ 
out essential difference; but that is because the 
cynic never dwelt in a cave in the primeval forest. 
There is between the first stages of society known 
to us and the stage at which we have arrived a 
progress almost incalculable in health, wealth, 
intelligence, successful adaptation to environ¬ 
ment, mutual aid, and resultant plenitude of cir¬ 
cumstances and longevity. 

But here we need to note, as against that en¬ 
thusiastic but undiscriminating trust in social 
evolution which has inspired much utopian theo¬ 
rizing in recent decades, that the progress of so¬ 
ciety is by no means ordained in the nature of 


IN THE BEGINNING 


45 


things. It depends upon the exercise of man’s 
free choice in the interest of ever more advanced 
civilization. Our Lord taught us to pray, “Thy 
Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it 
is in heaven”; whence we conclude that he con¬ 
templated a world-inclusive social order of peace, 
justice and security, as well within the range of 
possibility. But that he deemed its advent in¬ 
evitable is a sad misreading of his intention, 
which was to urge his followers to labor and sac¬ 
rifice for an end of which human hope might be 
cheated if they did less than their best, rather 
than to invite them to take their ease in idle 
apocalyptic expectation of a favorable trend of 
events in and of themselves. But surely no man 
who respects himself would ask that God should 
take away the freedom of the race, and, as it were, 
doom mankind to ineluctable progress. It is 
enough in this connection—it shows forth the 
delicacy of God’s handling of men, as well as the 
imperative insistence of His demands upon them 
—that we discover in human society the bare 
potentiality of continued advance, which it rests 
with men to actualize or not. 

Third, we must ask if there be a succession of 
changes for the better in human nature itself 
through the fast-following generations. Here 
I think that our answer must be in the negative. 
And it is because they observe that human nature, 


46 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


in its instincts, and in its errors, shortcomings 
and sins in consequence, remains ever essentially 
the same despite all modifications of manners, 
that some social philosophers pour scorn upon 
the hope of progress as a vain dream, discredited 
by incontrovertible facts. 

Certainly the fact is incontrovertible that men 
of the twentieth century after Christ have the 
same passions and are susceptible to the same 
temptations, broadly speaking, as were under¬ 
gone by men of the twentieth century before 
Christ. Every child is born, so far we can see, a 
mere animal, and must pass through the stages 
of savagery and barbarism before he achieves the 
status of a civilized being. And any child, what¬ 
ever his lineage, who should be consigned to the 
care of savages from infancy, would indubitably 
grow up a mere savage, like his foster-family. 
Does this, however, negate our conviction that 
God is to be found throughout the world, as well 
as in the characters of good men and the hearts 
of the spiritually enlightened? 

It would, if life on earth comprised the whole 
history of a man. If, when we die, we are dead, 
then not only is progress, which fails to modify 
human nature in its essentials, illusory, but all 
spiritual values must by a consistent logic be pro¬ 
nounced illusory as well. 

But here belief in immortality comes to our 


IN THE BEGINNING 


47 


aid. It is a mistake to suppose that belief in im¬ 
mortality is just a tenet of religion in its more 
advanced types, arrived at by a process of rea¬ 
soning upon dreams, shadows, reflections, and the 
like, as some anthropologists have maintained. 
It rests rather upon an intuition inseparable from 
self-consciousness itself—the distinctive mental 
endowment of man. It is because of this ines¬ 
capable intuition that men have deemed it worth 
while to reason about dreams and shadows, and 
have thus arrived at various pictorial representa¬ 
tions of future existence. Christianity, in its 
pure form, offers no such pictorial representa¬ 
tion, but the simple and sufficient assurance that 
life does go on, and under the guidance and care 
of Him from whom it came in the first instance. 

So, without attempting to define the circum¬ 
stances of the future state, we Christians regard 
man’s life on earth as a mere antechamber, a place 
of preparation for a larger life beyond. In other 
words, it becomes to us one grade, primary or, 
it may be, intermediate, in the school in which the 
Divine Mind is educating our souls. 

But in no school grade is progress in the hu¬ 
man materials found therein year after year to 
be discovered or expected. As one class is pro¬ 
moted, another class succeeds which has just 
attained the initial level of the class preceding it. 
So, for example, a fifth grade teacher may teach 


48 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


fifth grade pupils throughout her career; but no 
doubts are justified as to her pupils’ capacity 
later to master sixth grade subjects, simply on 
the ground that in the nature of the case they will 
never master those subjects under her direc¬ 
tion. 

The generations of mankind succeed each other 
like classes in a school-room. On this view of our 
life on earth, social progress is to be understood 
on the analogy of better housing, increased facili¬ 
ties and improved methods provided for pupils 
as times change and the community prospers ; but 
that human nature itself should remain at the 
same level not only fails to surprise or shock us, 
but is clearly what we have to expect. 

In this doctrine of an early poet with piercing 
insight into cosmic mysteries, that “in the begin¬ 
ning God created the heavens and the earth,” 
we have that assertion of God’s transcendence, 
of His logical and causal priority in the world of 
things, which is needed if our understanding of 
God, as incarnate in human character, and as 
immanent in human hearts, is to become a full- 
orbed view of the divine majesty. It is sup¬ 
ported by philosophical arguments establishing 
a probability in its behalf which is little short of 
coercive upon our minds. It is attested by our 
discoveries of beauty, of truth or dependability, 
of goodness in general and of goodness in its 


IN THE BEGINNING 


49 


special form of progress, in the life of this planet, 
which is our temporary home. 

Of God transcendent, the Creator, one greater 
than this poet has taught us to think in immeas¬ 
urably more tender and intimate terms, organic 
to our very existence, as our Father: no mere 
artificer of things and men, but the progenitor 
and loving protector of mankind, providing this 
planet for their shelter and training as an earthly 
parent provides a house for his children. 

To accept this interpretation of the universe— 
to come to feel that, however ill or little we under¬ 
stand some of His ways, we can nevertheless rest 
in the confidence that God presides over the des¬ 
tinies of stars and souls alike—is to achieve a re¬ 
assurance, in the face of life’s adversities and 
terrors, which lifts us above the despondent sus¬ 
picion that we are spiritual aliens intruded by 
accident upon a heartless and meaningless realm 
of dead matter and blind force, and establishes 
us in the heartening and inspiring conviction that 
we are at home in God’s own world, now and 
forever. 


V 


IMMANUEL 

It is God , that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, 
who shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge 
of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

—II Corinthians 4:6 

Christianity consists essentially in a personal 
relation to a Person. The significance of that 
divine personality, whom we call our Lord and 
Savior, is nowhere more clearly expressed than 
in this ecstatic utterance of the first Christian 
theologian, which may be taken to explain a name 
borrowed by Christian faith from the prophecies 
of Isaiah to describe Jesus, “Immanuel,” that is 
to say, “God with us.” We love and serve Christ 
because in him we see God manifested. 

The question suggests itself, whether the mani¬ 
festation of God in Christ be unique in kind as 
well as in degree; or whether revelation of the 
divine Being through human nature be a con¬ 
tinuous process throughout religious experience. 
If the latter be the case, we shall find our consent 
to this fundamental article of our creed con¬ 
firmed ; for modern thought views with confidence 
those processes which are continuous throughout 

50 


IMMANUEL 


51 


life, while it entertains a suspicion, justified by 
all observations thus far, of alleged facts emerg¬ 
ing at a given point anomalously, without par¬ 
allels or foreshadowings. 

How do men come to believe in God? Not, I 
am convinced, in the first instance, by reasoning. 
To be sure, when once we do believe in God, it is 
evident to us that He is the First Cause of all 
being. But men do not address themselves to 
the problem of the First Cause until the intellect 
has achieved a considerable degree of compe¬ 
tence; whereas men believe in God—that is, in 
the Unseen, of which the Christian doctrine of 
God is the most specific and elevated definition 
—long before they begin to deal in logical ab¬ 
stractions. Belief in God rests primarily upon 
feeling: upon an attitude of appreciation to¬ 
ward the universe, whereby we embrace the as¬ 
surance that life is full of meaning, and that the 
meaning or purpose of life, despite all its storms 
and darkness which would appear to contradict 
this assurance, is in harmony with the high re¬ 
quirements of moral goodness. Now what is the 
ground of this appreciative and trustful feeling? 

There are people who think that it is of bi¬ 
ological origin; that our conviction that life is 
worth living is just the vital urge rationalized. 
Every living thing, they say, clings to life by the 
law of its organic existence; and man, the reflect- 


52 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ing animal, gives this instinctive attachment to 
life a form of reason in the claim that the purpose 
of life is in accordance with his own deepest long¬ 
ings and most exalted aims. But to this biolog¬ 
ical reading of the affirmation that life as a 
whole is good, there are two insuperable objec¬ 
tions. The first is that the vital urge, as ex¬ 
pressed in the struggle for existence, has nothing 
to do with moral goodness, but rather encourages 
qualities opposed to it: ruthlessness and ferocity. 
The second is that men sometimes come to a 
place where disappointment and fatigue have 
taken away their personal love of living, so that 
they would be glad to pass quietly and utterly 
away into the peace of oblivion; yet even then 
they retain almost always their certainty that, 
however ill their own lives have turned out, life 
as a whole is good. So we must seek our explana¬ 
tion of this certainty elsewhere than in the mere 
rationalizing of the vital urge. 

And, as it seems to me, w r e shall find it in the 
influence of personality. It is because we see 
goodness incarnate and regnant in the human 
nature of those whom we trust and revere that 
we attribute this moral quality to the totality of 
experience, and are persuaded that goodness is 
the very principle of universal being. Let us see 
how these impressions of divine reality are made 
upon our minds. 


IMMANUEL 


53 


First, the child sees, in his father and mother, 
power, since they govern him; wisdom, since their 
judgment is proved by his testings to be better 
than his own; and love, since they are tender 
toward him, and he presently awakens to the 
realization that to provide for his needs they will 
unhesitatingly make any sacrifice. Not all 
parents are as good as their children think them; 
but, in relation at least to the child’s helplessness 
and ignorance, they do rightly and effectively 
represent God. And the child’s faith in God— 
that is, his belief that moral goodness is the law 
of the universe, which becomes faith in God 
upon reflection—is founded upon his apprecia¬ 
tion of his father and mother. Fortunate indeed 
is that child whose parents, realizing their obli¬ 
gation to manifest God in their flesh to his 
dawning apprehension, discharge this function 
conscientiously. Conversely, I think it will be 
found that most atheists were condemned to 
doubt and pessimism in the homes of their child¬ 
hood by discovering their parents in moral error 
—in lies, cruelty, or tyrannical selfishness. 

After the home comes the school; teachers are 
then associated with parents as illustrations of 
moral goodness to the mind of the child. If it is 
the peculiar privilege of parents to embody good¬ 
ness under its essential aspect of love, to teachers 
comes the weighty opportunity of incarnating it 


54 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


under the forms of truth and justice in their re¬ 
lations to their pupils. Many a child whose 
domestic surroundings have hardly been con¬ 
ducive to confidence in the divinity of life, has to 
thank the faithful, firm, loyal and stimulating 
friendship of godly counselors in the school-room, 
uncompromisingly devoted to truth and uni¬ 
formly equable in discipline, for the beginnings 
of a nobler and more inspiring outlook than his 
home imparted. 

Then comes the turn of our friends, as repre¬ 
sentatives of God. Deep and lasting friendship 
usually flowers first in the years between child¬ 
hood and manhood, when the youth is finding 
himself and defining his purposes in a freshly dis¬ 
covered world. Great are the perils of evil 
friendships at this time. But, on the other hand, 
inestimable are the services to character, at the 
same period, of friendship grounded in mutual 
respect and carried forward into those bonds of 
confidential intimacy which can only subsist 
among persons of the same generation. Many a 
boy has got his grip on righteousness as the ulti¬ 
mate law of being—that is, on faith in God— 
through contemplating with veiled and perhaps 
reluctant admiration the cheerful decency and 
robust idealism of a boon companion in the face 
of strong temptations candidly acknowledged 
and discussed. 


IMMANUEL 


55 


Friendship finds its loftiest term in the mar¬ 
riage relation, which opens out, to youth emerg¬ 
ing into maturity, new realms of loyalty, gentle¬ 
ness and delicacy, not dreamed of before. It is 
not by accident that many men come to religion 
through the influence of their wives, and that 
some women come to religion through the influ¬ 
ence of their husbands; for to the hearts of aver¬ 
age people no other chapter of experience so 
effectively illuminates the divine content and 
purport of experience as does the refining 
friendship of a congenial marriage. 

But friendship also reaches out, as we come 
into the fullness of our powers, beyond the 
intimacies of youth and the sacred confidences of 
matrimony, to include many, stronger, wiser and 
better than ourselves, who generously interest 
themselves in our welfare, and in whom we first 
discern, it may be, the full proportions of human 
nobility. I have been privileged to count dozens 
of men and women, old and young, among my 
friends, any one of whom, presenting the silent 
argument of an august moral serenity for my 
appreciation, would suffice to convince me that 
to produce such integrity the universe itself must 
be divine, and that there must be immortality, 
since for such a life cessation is unthinkable. 

Thus we see that the rudiments of religion are 
to be found in influences of moral goodness radi- 


56 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ating from benign personalities related to us in 
many different ways. We believe that life is 
good, despite its horrors and its griefs, because 
we are in touch with good lives. We believe in 
God, because we see Him revealed in human na¬ 
ture. Love is our first guide to faith; logic comes 
later. 

Not only is this true of individuals, but a like 
principle holds for the race. Ethnologists tell 
us that group religion originated in reverence for 
the ancestors of the clan. All the great faiths of 
mankind trace back their history to some hero, in 
whom people of his time and place beheld their 
ideals personified. Many of these heroes, how¬ 
ever, occupy ethical viewpoints which, though ad¬ 
vanced for their day, seem now pitifully inept 
and inadequate. They were men of limited vision 
and circumscribed outlook, whose revelations, up 
to a certain point authentic, fall nevertheless be¬ 
low the level of the common understanding of 
spiritual values in our age. Two only of these 
hero-saints of the race stand out above the rest, 
and tower over the mists of their eras, by virtue 
of the universal cogency of their examples, the 
purity and persuasiveness of their precepts. 

Of these two the first in point of time by some 
five centuries is Gautama, called the Buddha. If 
I did not know Christ, I should be a Buddhist, in 
sheer devout awe of that sublime leader, the first 


IMMANUEL 


57 


great teacher of the brotherhood of man, whose 
posthumous influence is responsible for most of 
the benign elements in the culture of the Far 
East. But, alas, Buddha’s moral teaching and 
his philosophy are not coherent with each other. 
What he signally but unconsciously illustrated in 
work and word—moral goodness as the principle 
of universal being—he deliberately denied in 
theory; for, in rebellious abhorrence of Hindu 
polytheism, Buddha was an atheist. 

You and I, however, need not pause upon the 
memory of this disheartening self-contradiction. 
We know the second of these transcendent racial 
heroes. Jesus, called the Christ, transcends Gau¬ 
tama the Buddha by so far as Gautama tran¬ 
scends all lesser heroes of mankind. In Christ we 
find works more gracious and words more lumi¬ 
nous than in Buddha or any other. And his 
philosophy confirms what his example as unmis¬ 
takably declares: that the Heart of Being is 
good, and that therefore our attitude toward life 
is to be trustful; that his goodness is ever active 
for the advantage of men, and that we may be 
privileged to cooperate with the Heart of Being 
in accomplishing His aims for His creatures. 
For Christ tells us that God is our Father; that 
He seeks to reclaim us from misuse of the free¬ 
dom He has given us, and shrinks from no 
sacrifice to that end, so that by no lesser symbol 


58 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


than the cross of our Elder Brother could His 
redemptive love be adequately exemplified; that, 
having won our trust and allegiance, God will 
work for and with us now and evermore; for the 
perfecting of our own character, and that we 
may bring others also to share His bounties. 

Thus “the light of the knowledge of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ” is the cul¬ 
mination of a series of manifestations of the Di¬ 
vine Being through human nature, to individuals 
and to the race; and the incarnation of God in 
our flesh is seen to be such a continuous process 
as we hoped to discover. That Christ is indeed 
the climactic expression of the deepest truth 
which men long to know is made clear by the at¬ 
tractiveness of his figure to hearts in every time 
and clime. The preaching of the gospel must 
ever center in the presentation of Christ; for it is 
not by syllogisms or benefactions, but only 
through entering with deep joy into fellowship 
with him, that men are led to accept his hopeful 
world-view and the noble ideals of thought and 
conduct inseparable from that view. 

I sometimes fear that we modern Christians, 
especially of a liberal persuasion, are growing 
hypercritically skeptical of this universal appeal 
of our Savior. We search the Scriptures with a 
tired gaze of sophistication, to find and stress ob¬ 
scure sayings of the Master which might puzzle 


IMMANUEL 


59 


prospective converts; and to deprecate the mirac¬ 
ulous element in the narratives of his earthly 
career, as though its improbability stood out from 
the page, and might vitiate the other factors of 
his appeal. But men who come to the four Gos¬ 
pels with unjaded eyes do not commonly concern 
themselves, one way or the other, with the mira¬ 
cles, or with passages hard to fathom, or other 
details of little consequence. They are still 
struck, as men have always been upon meeting 
the Master in the Gospels for the first time, with 
one stupendous and compelling impression: the 
wonder of the divine goodness, the very heart 
of God revealed in the quality of Jesus’ living. 
And naught else will ever win the world to ways 
of peace and righteousness, save the irresistible 
moral beauty of the God-Man, presented to all 
men as the center of their hopes, the object of 
their worship, and the companion of their toils. 

An approach to the dogma of the Church as to 
the person of our Lord should always be made 
through a fresh appreciation of his human per¬ 
sonality. The Church asserts that, though he 
died on Calvary, he now lives; that he has lived 
from all eternity with God the Father, and is of 
the same substance with Him; that he is omni¬ 
present, as God is omnipresent; that we men may 
have the living Christ as our friend and comrade 
upon the rough road of this world if we will. 


60 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


Tremendous assertions, these of the historic 
creeds! And I am prepared to grant that they 
can be neither logically demonstrated, nor clearly 
pictured forth in our minds. Nevertheless, I 
hold them true, for the reason that they are inter¬ 
pretations, at once gravely philosophical and 
splendidly poetic, of the actual experience of the 
faithful. The Christian heart knows that Christ 
still lives, and that he and God are in superlative 
degree, and consequently in a unique sense, one. 
There is that about our Lord’s supreme manifes¬ 
tation of God’s nature in our flesh, moreover, in 
contrast with all like manifestations in lesser de¬ 
gree throughout the continuous process of the in¬ 
carnation, which we feel to be essentially timeless. 
As long as Christian souls sense this su¬ 
premacy and its implications, the Christian for¬ 
mularies as to our Lord’s nature, antique though 
their phraseology be, will ring true as glorious 
hymns of adoration to the only-begotten Son of 
God Most High. 

Men come to believe in God, in the first in¬ 
stance, not through arguments about the First 
Cause, but because they feel that life is full of 
meaning, and that its meaning is harmonious 
with moral goodness. That feeling is begotten 
in child and man continuously throughout the 
period of our earthly sojourn by seeing God in 
other human beings; that is, by beholding good- 


IMMANUEL 


61 


ness in ascendency over the lives of those whom 
we trust and revere. Faith on a racial scale has 
come about in the same way, through trust and 
reverence for mankind’s heroes; and among man¬ 
kind’s heroes Christ is sovereign, so that in his 
face we see the light of the knowledge of the 
glory of God, and to him our faith ascribes no 
less a quality than very deity. 

But in the lesser measure of our opportunities 
and qualifications, if this account of the incarna¬ 
tion be correct, we also are called upon to repre¬ 
sent and embody divinity. There are people who 
are looking to each of us, hoping—unconsciously, 
perhaps—that in us they may see God. That is 
the function of influence: not only to affect the 
lives of others in immediate ways and to concrete 
ends, but also, and indeed chiefly, so to affect 
them that they shall feel, as it were intuitively, 
the goodness of all living, and by that sentiment 
shall be directed forward to knowledge of the 
living God. Immeasurable, then, is our oppor¬ 
tunity through the influence of our characters; 
awful is our failure if our influence turn men 
away from God instead of drawing them toward 
Him. 

No one of us can weigh the issue with which 
we are thus confronted without shuddering lest 
in some of his relations with his fellow-men he 
fail; without longing that in all his relations with 


62 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


them he may let the light of God shine through 
his life upon God’s children. To ensure our¬ 
selves against the failure we fear, and grow 
strong to exert the divine influence we would 
radiate, we must make Christ our friend, and 
walk with him. Christianity is a personal rela¬ 
tion to a Person. Let us sustain and deepen that 
relation through the faithful exercise of our 
spiritual privileges in meditation and prayer, in 
order that the world may see the light of God’s 
glory reflected in our faces. 


VI 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 

And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before 
Jehovah. And, behold, Jehovah passed by, and a great and 
strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the 
rocks before Jehovah; but Jehovah was not in the wind: 
and after the wind an earthquake; but Jehovah was not in 
the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but Jehovah 
was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. 

—I Kings 19:11, 12 

Belief in God—in goodness as the conscious, 
that is the personal, principle of all being—is 
begotten in us by the influence of goodness in 
other personalities whom we love and revere. 
And this revelation, bespeaking faith, reaches its 
climax in Jesus Christ our Lord. But how do we 
recognize goodness when we see it? And how 
can we find God when we are alone, beyond the 
reach of human influence? 

These questions are fundamental and urgent. 
For never do we need God more than while we 
are going through those desolate passages of 
earthly experience in which we realize how in¬ 
superable are the barriers which separate our 
souls from all others. Not only so, but we are 
alone, though with a less poignant sense of lone- 

63 


64 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


liness, even when we are surrounded by the most 
tender and sympathetic human associations. For 
we are alone when we think, when we come to 
conclusions, when we make decisions; since no 
one can think our thoughts for us, though others 
may comprehend our thoughts when we speak 
them forth. 

A parable of the search for God in the depths 
of the heart of man is afforded us by the ancient 
wonder-story of Elijah on Mount Horeb. The 
sturdy old prophet, having set at naught wicked 
King Ahab, was in flight from Ahab’s vengeful 
queen, and found himself in utter solitude, cut 
off from every terrestrial resource. But in the 
wilderness God ministered to him, and mani¬ 
fested himself in a way conveying the positive 
certainty of the divine presence to His servant. 
We can picture Elijah standing stalwart against 
the storm, feeling out after God, as the impres¬ 
sive pageantry of a tremendous hurricane played 
about him. But not in wind or quake or light¬ 
ning did he find Him. These were but the pan¬ 
oplies of the divine majesty, which was itself 
made known to him in a still small voice, some¬ 
how audible above the turmoil. The phrase “still 
small voice” is a graphic description of the inner 
witness, the word of God in our very souls, 
whereby we are fortified against the tempests of 
this world, and led to discern a divine purpose 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


65 


even when the skies above us are darkest. This 
graphic description has inspired a stanza of 
Whittier’s loveliest sacred poem: 

Breathe through the heats of our desire 
Thy coolness and Thy balm; 

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; 

Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, 

O still small voice of calm. 

How do we recognize goodness when we see it? 
The fact is that we do recognize it. And we can 
only suppose that we do so because goodness 
corresponds to something deep in our own na¬ 
ture; that our souls are instruments sensitive to 
divine impressions; that God, whom we find in 
the character of good men, and above all in the 
holy love of Christ, has a mouthpiece in our own 
hearts, however weak and wayward we may be; 
so that, by hearkening, we may catch the accents 
of divine assurance within, even when we are 
alone. 

We have not far to seek this mouthpiece. We 
call it conscience. Conscience is that sensitive¬ 
ness in us to moral issues whereby we are irre¬ 
sistibly impelled to think in terms of right and 
wrong. The verdict of conscience, to be sure, is 
not the same for all persons in all periods; but, 
whatever the stage of their moral development 
be, whether they be relatively blind or relatively 
clairvoyant on these issues, the fact remains that 


66 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


all men are at least conscious of the meaning of 
ethical distinctions. Again, some people have 
consciences so rudimentary through lack of train¬ 
ing, or so blunted by disuse, that at most points 
they seem to be, not moral, nor immoral, but un¬ 
moral; nevertheless, at some point every man is 
morally sensitive, and attempts to interpret right 
and wrong in terms of expediency, of utility, of 
the fear of consequences on the one hand and the 
hope of them on the other, are fruitless. For 
every man knows that his conscience proceeds 
often in utter disregard of all considerations of 
his selfish advantage. So conscience must be ex¬ 
plained as the receiving instrument in our minds 
for the messages of that goodness which is the 
conscious purpose of all being. 

We hear many tones of God’s voice in con¬ 
science. First, there is the tone of command. 
Some things we must do; other things we must 
not do. An inner compulsion comes upon a man, 
which he knows he will withstand at his peril. 
We have all been obliged at some time to go 
counter to our own desires in order to keep our 
self-respect. After one such experience no room 
is left for doubt as to the imperative quality of 
this subjective command. Now and then, of 
course, conscience bids us do what we want to do; 
but so infrequently that, as a general rule, we 
are suspicious of our own honesty when con- 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


67 


science and desire seem to coincide. We know 
that we are on safe ground, however, when, at 
the behest of the still small voice, we say, “This 
is what I want to do; but I will not: that is what 
I do not want to do; but I will!” 

But when we take the other line, and defy con¬ 
science, then we hear the voice of God within in 
tones of awful condemnation. I am disposed to 
hold that the lurid depictions of hell current in 
medieval theology, incredible in a literal sense, 
originated as accurate and arresting allegories of 
the torments which conscience inflicts upon the 
deliberate wrong-doer. I have been in hell; and 
so have you. Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy 
shows us Macbeth and his wife in hell; the great¬ 
ness of the tragedy consists in the universality 
of its appeal, since every one of us, alas, has 
undergone this dire adventure in some connection 
and degree. But the tragedy of the guilty con¬ 
science has an aspect of sublimity. For we 
should not know, and hate, and fear, and abhor 
our sins, if our souls were not sensitized to God’s 
will by kinship with Him; or if God were not 
concerned for our souls, to bring us to a mood of 
penitence. 

How do we come to that mood? As we grovel 
in the mire we hear the still small voice saying: 
“The past is over and done with; this is a new 
day; stand on your feet, and go forward!” A 


68 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


morning dawns, for the man of courage who has 
sinned, when he says to himself (as we suppose, 
but in truth it is God who speaks to him): “I 
have indeed done wrong; I cannot undo it, and I 
will not deny it. But I will make such reparation 
for it as lies within my power, and will depart 
from it; and from this time on I will face toward 
the light!” Then there comes an ineffable sense 
of comfort, confidence and renewal. That is the 
voice of God in pardon; it heralds the beginning 
of a new life. 

When we honestly weigh our own resources 
against the claims which conscience makes upon 
us, we cannot but be aware that we need strength 
beyond the common measure of our living in 
order to meet them. That strength comes to us 
when we lose ourselves in some outgoing devo¬ 
tion. When love comes to us—the type of love in 
which desire for possession is not dominant, but a 
passion of sacrifice—our feeble wills are re-en- 
forced as by a miracle. The mother for her child, 
the follower for his trusted leader, the true 
Christian for his Savior, can overcome tempta¬ 
tions otherwise irresistible, and accomplish more 
than reason could demand of flesh and blood. 
Of like sort is the enrichment of capacity which 
ensues when a man becomes a whole-hearted 
devotee of some great cause. Cowardice is 
vanquished, battle has no terror, for a soldier in 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


69 


love with his imperiled country; the shadow of 
death holds no gloom for the experimental 
scientist who braves the menace of the direst 
plague in the hope that he may bring a specific 
against it back from the very verge of the grave 
for suffering humanity; apostles of the cross 
have in our time, as in centuries past, met torture 
and destruction with a smile for the Gospel’s 
sake. Whence come these mighty affections and 
enthusiasms, dynamic to our wavering resolution? 
Whence, indeed, but from the spirit of God 
within us, breathing the power of His love into 
our wills? 

There is another manifestation of the divine 
presence in our hearts which has meant a great 
deal to me; and I hope and believe that most of 
you have shared it. I mean the voice of God in 
guidance over perplexing paths and through 
situations from which no outcome is apparent to 
our vision. There are times when a fog of un¬ 
certainty closes us in, so that we cannot see even 
the next step before us; when we can hardly be¬ 
lieve that we shall ever find our way again. But 
then, if only we stop straining our eyes, and give 
up trying to find our own way, and are content 
to wait for the inner monitor to direct our course 
—then such direction comes. Often only one step 
at a time in advance is made clear to us; we take 
that step, however, without anxiety as to what 


70 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


may lie beyond it, and keep on repeating this sure 
though tedious process, until presently the fog 
lifts, the road lies straight before us, and in sun¬ 
light, or it may be by calculations upon a single 
star, but in either case with a new feeling of se¬ 
curity and confidence, we go untroubled toward 
our goal. 

If he who sets conscience at naught invites 
thereby the infernal wretchedness of guilt and 
shame, it is equally indubitable that he who, on 
the contrary, yields to conscience his trustful 
obedience, achieves heaven in his heart. For he 
knows that he has done right; and he knows that 
to do right is in itself and for its own sake better 
than any material reward. How does he know 
it? By an intuition producing in him, without 
his conscious participation, a calm like the serene 
equipoise of timeless being: God tells him; he has 
heard the still small voice in commendation and 
encouragement. 

And, finally, and I think to most of us but 
very occasionally—perhaps not a dozen times in 
our lives—yet unmistakably, our inner being ex¬ 
pands in some fleeting moment of immensely 
heightened sensibility to the dimensions of cos¬ 
mic joy, and it is as though celestial choirs sus¬ 
tained the voice of God, rendering the occult 
harmonies of the universe in our souls. I am not 
thinking now of any technical or temperamental 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


71 


appreciation of beauty, truth or goodness. I am 
thinking of an experience literally indescribable 
which may come to the man who has sincerely 
sought to live in conformity with the still small 
voice of moral discrimination and mandate in his 
own bosom. We plod through the years, some¬ 
times befogged, and again with light overhead; 
sometimes uphill, and sometimes down; with a 
steady workaday peace of mind, it may be, but 
no mystic radiance. Then of a sudden we come 
to a place whence the world is seen transfigured: 
momentarily we “get the hang of things”—that 
colloquialism comes nearer to expressing this rare 
and exalted spiritual adventure than any choicer 
phrase I have heard. After such a moment— 
when we have felt the flow of infinite life 
through our veins, and ourselves in rapt attune- 
ment to universal purpose, and all things of 
time and space have been sacramental of super¬ 
nal reality to our senses—we are prone to mourn 
the fading of the glory, and to wish that upon 
the place of transfiguration we might pitch our 
tents forever. But it would not be good for us 
or for the world that we should do so. There is 
time enough ahead, when our work is done here, 
for sustained cosmic consciousness. For the 
present it should and must suffice that we have 
hearkened to the full diapason of the divine 
tones at once; that we can never again doubt 


72 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


Him whose voice has for a moment filled our 
souls, so that its echoes yet return when we wist¬ 
fully invoke them. 

Now in presenting these intimate aspects of 
the inner revelation of God I have not described 
my own experience, or yours, or even that of 
Christians in general, solely or chiefly. I have 
been speaking the language of all mankind. 
Conscience—its requirements, its censures, its 
grants of pardon to courageous penitence and 
of power for a new life, its approval, its guid¬ 
ance, and the ecstasies to which it sometimes 
leads—conscience, I say, in all these phases, is 
known in every land, by men of every creed. 
And, with whatever divergencies of detail in 
special traditions and environments, the grand 
lines of its injunctions and procedure are uni¬ 
form. That is why we can claim that conscience 
is the voice of the God of all the earth. He who 
is habitually attentive to this voice will not fail, 
moreover, to divine the presence it attests in 
outer nature as well as in the soul of man. The 
conscious purpose of all being is, to be sure, as 
yet inarticulate in stellar and geologic processes, 
and at the lower levels of vital evolution; but 
that which arrives at expression in man, whose 
spiritual capacities constitute the crown of crea¬ 
tion as we see it, must doubtless exist and press 
upward with its beneficent urge also beneath the 


THE STILL SMALL VOICE 


73 


threshold of finite mind. So that the still small 
voice—the Holy Spirit of God, God Immanent 
—confirms the invitation of God revealed in 
character—God incarnate, God the Son—to 
faith in righteousness as the universal law, even 
though the outer order sometimes fails to make 
that law evident to our perceptions. 

But, though men of all creeds have found 
God in conscience, yet it is only when spiritual 
aspiration is defined in terms of the character 
of Christ and quickened by faith in him that 
conscience, the inspirer of character, operates 
regularly and extensively in the many gracious 
ways which we have considered. The sense of 
pardon, for instance, has certainly come to some 
men who, knowing not Christ, yet sought God; 
but to very few of them. But pardon is a nor¬ 
mal element of every Christian’s experience; to 
this we all can bear witness. Thus the sacred 
influences of the Spirit are outpoured in special 
and abundant measure, as on the Apostolic 
Church at Pentecost, upon those whose concept 
of the Infinite Being conforms to the gracious 
lineaments of Jesus. As these sacred influences 
are potentially heightened, however, by Chris¬ 
tian faith, so is deepened the responsibility of 
them that call Jesus Lord for cultivating the 
gifts of the Spirit. We are not exempted by 
the Savior’s grace from hearkening to con- 


74 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


science; we are the more obligated thereto, by 
virtue of the assurance we have that conscience 
is the very voice of God, the mouthpiece of His 
Spirit, and that God is love, so that His laws are 
not dictates of His arbitrary will, but are vouch¬ 
safed for our enlightenment on the path of 
peace and eternal fulfilment. It is for us, then, 
gratefully accepting this assurance, to hearken 
to the still small voice, and heed it; that our be¬ 
lief in God may be no mere article of an inert 
creed, but a vital energy shaping our natures in 
His likeness. 


VII 


THE HOLY TRINITY 

.... Neither is there any other name under heaven, 
that is given among men, wherein we must he saved. 

—Acts 4:12 

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity has ever 
been regarded as fundamental to Christian 
theology. Yet nowhere in the New Testament 
is this doctrine explicitly stated. For the com¬ 
mission to the Apostles with which the first Gos¬ 
pel concludes, and which directs them to “make 
disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into 
the name of the Father and of the Son and of 
the Holy Spirit,” is quite surely an addition to 
the original text. Nevertheless, this doctrine 
seems to me to be implicit in the teachings of 
our Lord himself, of the Apostles who had 
known him in the flesh, and of St. Paul. I 
trust that I am not unduly influenced by tradi¬ 
tion ; and, as I hope to make clear, I by no means 
regard acquaintance with, or acceptance of, this 
doctrine as essential to saving fellowship with 
God. Nevertheless, the more I reflect upon the 
subject, the more convinced I become that the 

75 


76 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


historic doctrine of the Trinity, fairly inter¬ 
preted, is requisite to explain the general tenor 
and main emphases of Christian faith. 

In default of an explicit statement of the 
doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament, I 
have chosen as the text of this discussion an 
utterance of St. Peter, succinctly and emphati¬ 
cally enunciating that profound conviction which 
was the primary motive of later theologians in 
formulating the trinitarian definition of the 
Divine Being; namely, the confident and en¬ 
thusiastic assurance that Jesus was one with 
God. The Apostles, of whom St. Peter was for 
the moment the leader, had long walked and 
talked with the Prophet of Nazareth. And the 
net result of that regenerating intimacy was 
that, with love and wondering awe, they felt 
that they had to acclaim him as the supreme 
manifestation of God, a manifestation the de¬ 
gree of which was so superlative that it 
amounted to a qualitative difference from all 
lesser revelations of God through the character 
of righteous men, and certified to their hearts 
that Jesus was, in a unique sense, the very Son 
of God, so that they deemed themselves justified 
in asserting his celestial pre-existence, and the 
identity of his nature with that of the Creator 
of all things and Father of all mankind. These 
are tremendous conclusions; but their major 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


77 


premise is a transcendent devotion which admits 
no doubt of its own clairvoyance in regard to its 
object. So fundamental is this personal atti¬ 
tude toward Jesus to the understanding of 
Christian truth that it would no doubt be hope¬ 
less to attempt to persuade any one who does 
not share it of the validity of the doctrine of the 
Trinity. But, conversely, no one who does share 
this attitude will fail to arrive at this doctrine if 
he follow through a course of sound reasoning 
from this starting-point. 

When St. Peter uttered before the high priest 
of the Jews his defiant and uncompromising as¬ 
sertion of the supremacy of Jesus, his identity 
with God the Savior, he was speaking in the 
power of the Holy Spirit, that is, under the in¬ 
fluence of that marvelous sharpening of moral 
discernment and that quickening of spiritual 
capacities which came upon the first believers on 
the day of Pentecost. And in this influence St. 
Peter and his associates recognized the same 
power which they had beheld displayed in their 
Master. Between him and this inner dynamic 
of triumphant living they could draw no dis¬ 
tinction, nor did they seek to do so; instead, they 
described this Spirit which abode in them as the 
Spirit of Christ, or as the Spirit of God, indif¬ 
ferently. Because some such heightening of 
religious experience, productive of moral reno- 


78 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


vation, has always characterized the approach 
of men through Christ to the Eternal, to the 
Holy Spirit as well as to Christ the faith of the 
Church ascribes equal rank in the Godhead with 
God the Father. 

One phase of St. Peter’s confession is obscure 
to our understanding at first thought, because 
of a change in the connotation of one of its 
terms. A name is just a name to us; so we can¬ 
not easily comprehend what salvation in or by 
a name may mean, unless indeed some magical 
incantation. Hence we are disposed to suspect 
that salvation by a name can be only nominal 
salvation. But throughout the Old and New 
Testaments the word “name” is used in connec¬ 
tion with the Object of worship as a symbol of 
His power. To explain how this came about, 
and to illustrate the prevalence of this idea 
among all early peoples as well as in Israel, 
would not be difficult, but would take more time 
than is now at our disposal. So I ask you simply 
to accept my explanation that “name” is here 
the synonym of “power.” Reading the text in 
this sense, we see at once that what St. Peter 
is asserting is that Christ is in fact, whether so 
acknowledged by all or not, one with the power 
of salvation, wherever and however that power 
may be manifested on earth. 

A further point requires clarification in con- 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


79 


nection with this identification of the “name,” 
or power, of Christ with that divine energy 
which effects salvation. This has commonly 
been supposed to mean that unless a man specifi¬ 
cally invoked the name of Christ, or availed him¬ 
self of Christ’s power with full recognition of its 
source, he could not be saved. This harsh and 
repellent interpretation is embodied in the eight¬ 
eenth of the Articles of Religion of the Church 
of England: 

“They also are to be had accursed that pre¬ 
sume to say, That every man shall be saved by 
the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he 
be diligent to frame his life according to that 
Law, and the Light of Nature. For Holy 
Scripture doth set out to us only the Name of 
Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved.” 

But that is in effect to maintain that St. Peter 
was implying the alienation, presumably per¬ 
petual, of all souls from God, save only the 
handful of the Nazarene’s disciples, whom he 
represented. Any such notion of his intention 
is obviously preposterous. There have, to be 
sure, been not a few who in the name of Christ 
have sought to arrogate to themselves some such 
monopoly of saving grace. But surely St. 
Peter himself cannot have propounded so big¬ 
oted a pretension. For he had walked with 
Jesus; and Jesus was of all men the most broad- 


80 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


minded and tolerant, in matters affecting mere 
opinion and theological definition. It is not only 
a misinterpretation, it is a revoltingly irreverent 
parody of Jesus’ attitude toward his fellow-men 
to suppose that he, or any man who had come 
under his influence, could advance any such nar¬ 
row claim, belying the wideness of God’s mercy. 
St. Peter did not mean that no man could find 
salvation without acknowledging Christ; he 
meant that whenever a man found salvation, 
that came about, whether he knew it or not, by 
the effective operation of the power of Christ, 
who is one with God. 

Now let us get the doctrine of the Trinity 
definitely before us. It is briefly yet compen¬ 
diously set forth in the first of the Articles of 
Religion of the Church of England: 

“There is but one living and true God, ever¬ 
lasting, without body, parts or passions; of in¬ 
finite power, wisdom and goodness; the Maker, 
and Preserver of all things both visible and in¬ 
visible. And in unity of this Godhead there be 
three Persons, of one substance, power, and 
eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost.” 

How can there be three Persons in one God? 
Here again the argument turns upon an am¬ 
biguous word. We use the word “person” to 
designate a distinct individual, an isolated cen- 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


81 


ter of consciousness. It is capable of demon¬ 
stration that this modern concept of a “person” 
owes its origination to the Christian religion. 
Those eccentrics of our day who advance ex¬ 
travagant claims in behalf of the rights of per¬ 
sonality to self-expression are unwittingly stat¬ 
ing, in a perverse and inverted way, one result 
of Christ’s emancipation of the human soul. 
Nevertheless, the word “person” conveyed no 
such meaning to any one when it was introduced 
into theology to designate the inner constitution 
of God; the idea itself was as yet hardly clear, 
and this was not the term employed to designate 
it. When we hear of three Persons in one God, 
therefore, we are not to understand thereby 
three people, as it were, joined in one by some 
inconceivable abnormality. 

Not only has much criticism of the doctrine 
of the Trinity been grounded in this misconcep¬ 
tion, but, thanks to it, some meanings have been 
read into the doctrine by believers which ap¬ 
proach the ludicrous. One recent instance of 
this is the view popular among enthusiasts for 
the “social gospel,” that the Godhead itself pre¬ 
sents the prototype of social relations, as though 
Father, Son and Holy Ghost made up a house¬ 
hold; or, perhaps, an excessively exclusive club. 
All such grotesque misrepresentations would be 
done away with if their devotees would but con- 


82 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


sider the history of the word “person,” and note 
the point in that history at which the definition 
of the Holy Trinity was formulated. 

But, if “three persons” does not mean three 
different “people,” what are we to understand 
by the term? First, three manifestations of the 
Supreme Power of the Universe—of that good¬ 
ness which by Christians is held to be the con¬ 
scious purpose of all being: in human character, 
objectively viewed; in conscience; and in the 
outer order, or nature. Second, corresponding 
to these temporal manifestations, such an in¬ 
trinsic constitution or economy of the Divine 
Being that God is eternally expressing Himself 
in creation; eternally putting His heart into His 
work; and eternally indwelling the whole process 
of becoming, so that every natural force is to be 
viewed as a manifestation upon its own plane 
of that divine energy which becomes articulate 
in the human conscience. And, however appre¬ 
hended, whether as transcendent or as immanent 
or as incarnate, it is ever God, and the same 
God, whom we find when we follow the avenues 
of life far enough to penetrate to ultimate 
values. 

I am aware that this explanation is at once 
so inadequate as to satisfy no systematic thinker, 
and so complex as to bewilder others. But we 
shall see that it suffices, at least, for our purpose, 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


83 


by virtue of the practical meanings which it sug¬ 
gests. It is because of these practical meanings, 
I believe, rather than from any love of abstruse 
speculation, that the doctrine of the Trinity will 
continue to hold its high place in Christian 
thought. 

These practical meanings are derived from a 
parallelism of the Holy Trinity with the tri¬ 
partite constitution of human personality—a 
parallelism which would be so startling if it were 
a mere coincidence that it affords in itself an 
argument in support of the trinitarian view, as 
required by our religious needs, in that it at¬ 
tributes to the Supreme Being a full correspond¬ 
ence with the nature of His earthly children. 
For God the Creator corresponds to man active, 
to the will, which is the spring of our actions; 
God Incarnate corresponds to man’s emotional 
nature, since it is by love that we recognize Him; 
God Immanent corresponds to the human intel¬ 
lect, since He is the Spirit of Truth, and Truth 
can only be recognized by man through exer¬ 
cise in various connections of that inner dis¬ 
crimination which at the level of moral decisions 
we recognize clearly as the still small voice of 
God. 

Regarded in this light, the doctrine of the 
Trinity, so far from closing all doors of salvation 
to men save only the august and often inacces- 


84 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


sible portal of an exactly accurate belief, throws 
open all the doors there are in man’s nature, 
corresponding to the divine constitution, and 
would persuade us that whenever a man achieves 
righteousness we are to recognize God as his 
coadjutor in that high emprise. 

For righteousness is salvation. That is only 
a working equation, to be sure, an approxima¬ 
tion, like 3.14159 as the numerical equivalent of 
w; but like that number, it is exact enough to 
work for our purposes. For righteousness is 
the only available satisfactory demonstration of 
deliverance from evil into harmony with God. 
There was little or no other-wordly emphasis in 
the teaching of Jesus; so he and his followers 
were certainly not thinking chiefly of the future 
life when they spoke of salvation. Jesus be¬ 
lieved so positively in the future life that 
apparently he felt no need of dogmatizing 
about it, or of making specific preparation 
for it. Instead, it was his habit to commend 
those men, whatever their creed, in whom he 
beheld moral worth, and to treat them as his 
friends. No one who studies the Master’s life 
with an open mind can doubt but that he be¬ 
lieved, as we also do instinctively, that if a man 
lives aright in this life, he need have no fears for 
the life to come. But it is only by the power of 
God, whether he recognize it or not, that any 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


85 


man can live aright in this life. So when we 
see a man so living—that is, not sinlessly, of 
course, but so that the dominant tone of his 
thought and action is in harmony with con¬ 
science—we, who understand how these things 
come about, are to praise God for helping him, 
and to praise him for helping God. 

How do men seek righteousness? One way is 
by the direct approach to morality; that is, by 
striving to live in accordance with the dictates of 
conscience, recognized as the ultimate authority, 
with little if any further theorizing about its 
origin or basis. This is the way of the moralist. 
Many a moralist in our time follows this way 
with no definite belief at all beyond this accept¬ 
ance of the supreme claim of his own highest 
ideal upon his energies. Occasionally he even 
calls himself an atheist; more often, an agnostic. 
But no one who knows such moralists can deny 
that some of them achieve a height of personal 
integrity—not merely of the cold, austere and 
negative virtue of self-control, but of gracious, 
generous, ardent, sacrificial service of their fel¬ 
low-men—which puts many who accept the or¬ 
thodox creeds to shame. What shall we say, 
then, of such a man? That he has achieved or 
is achieving salvation. That he is working in 
harmony with God the Creator, who participates 
inevitably in all constructive efforts throughout 


86 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


His creation; that he is approaching God 
through the resolute benevolence of his activities 
in accord with the divine Will, and is therefore 
destined, some day, here or hereafter, to rejoice 
in the discovery of the principle which now he 
blindly obeys. If we would win him to Christian 
faith, it is not in order that he may get to 
heaven, but in order that he may be a happier 
man on the way! 

Another way whereby men effect right rela¬ 
tions with the universe—which is equivalent to 
qualifying as acceptable servants of God, 
whether they know it or not—is through single- 
minded search for truth. That holds even 
though they have the misfortune to fall into er¬ 
ror. For the scientist, proceeding cautiously to¬ 
ward conclusions which he may legitimately 
hold to be verified; the philosopher, analyzing 
concepts and combining ideas as the scientist 
analyzes things and combines elements, with an 
abhorrence for guesswork and prejudice—these 
men must and do bring their passions under the 
mastery of their stern ideals of unsullied ve¬ 
racity; while the service they thus render to truth 
clarifies human thinking and accelerates racial 
progress. Such men are often disaffected to¬ 
ward religion, or at least something less than 
wholehearted in endorsement of its doctrines; 
for the criteria of truth to which they are re- 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


87 


stricted within the regions of their several studies 
—in empirical data, and generalizations based 
thereon—do not suffice at the deeper level of re¬ 
ligious certainty, and they are familiar with no 
others. Nevertheless in fact, though not to their 
own knowledge, scientists and philosophers are 
eminently religious men. For to them mankind 
is indebted not only for material gains but also 
in large measure for spiritual emancipation; and 
these are works of righteousness. Measured by 
the results they have obtained thus far, not to 
mention the promises their labors hold out for 
the future, these men have achieved harmony 
with God—salvation—and they have done it by 
way of that discernment of and love for truth 
which to the believer in the triune God betokens 
the operation of the Holy Spirit within the 
breasts of men. 

Of course, the way wherein most men seek 
salvation—the simple and obvious way in which 
to pursue and apprehend the ideals of righteous¬ 
ness, which are the indices of salvation in this 
world—is the path of religious faith, which is 
primarily a state of feeling. Faith finds its 
most glorious object, for God finds His consum¬ 
mate revelation, in our Lord Jesus Christ. But 
sometimes men have found righteousness through 
devotion to lesser manifestations of the divine 
nature in human character. There have been 


88 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


saints in the following of Buddha, of Moham¬ 
med, and of many another minor spokesman of 
the Eternal. Shall we deny their sanctity be¬ 
cause they knew not Christ? We cannot do 
that; for Christ obliges us, above all things, to 
be honest. What, then, shall we say? Why, 
that God incarnate in any life better than our 
own for our guidance, is Christ incarnate, since 
Christ is one with God; so men who know not 
Jesus can come to God through the Christ- 
principle exemplified in Buddha and the rest. 

Thus I have tried to show that the doctrine of 
the Holy Trinity assures us of correspondence 
in the Godhead with our own nature, com¬ 
pounded of will, intelligence and feeling; so that, 
in the light of this doctrine, fairly interpreted, 
we cannot fail to recognize the divine power 
operative wherever its fruits are discernible in 
human life in righteousness, whether that right¬ 
eousness be sought as the moralist seeks it, or as 
the scientist and philosopher seek it, or as the 
religionist, of whatever creed, seeks it. But 
what, one may ask, is then the advantage of ac¬ 
cepting the Christian Gospel, if the power of 
God unto salvation manifests itself also where 
that Gospel is not accepted or understood? The 
same advantage as pertains to the comprehen¬ 
sion of any dependable principle or law. When 
one knows the law, one can fulfill its require- 


THE HOLY TRINITY 


89 


merits more easily by far, and guard against in¬ 
fringements of it more adequately, than when 
the law is not understood. Instead of having to 
work along from day to day by the costly 
method of trial and error, one can then go for¬ 
ward steadily, with economy of effort and a 
maximum result, toward the goal pursued. 

An interesting analogy occurs in medical 
practice. Elementary decency prompts cleanli¬ 
ness in the care of the afflicted; and cleanliness 
is the sum and substance of antisepsis. So, 
many surgical operations were performed with¬ 
out subsequent infection before the nineteenth 
century. But more often—with ghastly fre¬ 
quency, indeed—fatal infections did ensue, be¬ 
cause the principle of antisepsis was not 
understood, and consequently was not rigorously 
applied. After Lister and Pasteur had set that 
principle in a clear light, however, the results of 
surgery were amazingly enhanced because at 
length properly safeguarded. In the same way, 
true righteousness—salvation—is often attained 
without knowledge of its principle; but, alas, 
how seldom, in comparison with the results 
achieved through the Gospel, which sets that 
principle in a clear light. 

He only will think that Christianity is cheap¬ 
ened by this frank recognition of salvation 
where the Gospel is not known, who fails to 


90 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


grasp the importance of scientific procedure in 
comparison with haphazard effort, throughout 
the broad field of human endeavor. In the field 
of endeavor for righteousness—that is, salvation 
—our advance is immeasurably facilitated and 
hastened by that understanding of spiritual pro¬ 
cesses which the Gospel communicates. 

But this advantage involves a commensurate 
responsibility. Lamentable indeed will our case 
be if, accepting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity 
and comprehending its implications as to the 
avenues through which God works and is to be 
approached, we fail to open our lives to His 
operation and to seek Him in all the ways in 
which He is accessible. Re-dedicating our lives, 
then, to the realization of the moral ideal, as its 
plenitude is manifest in Christ Jesus, let us re¬ 
joice in our reassuring and invigorating knowl¬ 
edge of the divine nature; yet with trembling 
lest, if in passion or indolence we turn back, we 
incur the guilt of having neglected that prin¬ 
ciple, the triune nature of the divine omnipres¬ 
ence, which opens up a broad and firm highway 
of salvation before the Christian. 


VIII 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 

Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them 
ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness 
of me. — St. John 5:39 

In this passage Jesus was not only or prima¬ 
rily commending the Scriptures. He took for 
granted agreement as to their supreme value. 
He was criticizing his critics for the way in 
which they approached the Scriptures, the ex¬ 
pectation they entertained in searching them. 
And this criticism of their attitude toward the 
holy writings of Israel was in effect an indict¬ 
ment of the very character of these opponents 
of the Gospel. For, if they had been men of the 
right sort, they would not have studied the 
Scriptures in the wrong spirit. 

If these critics of Jesus had been spiritually 
minded, they would have gone to the Scriptures 
looking for ideals. For it is by ideals that the 
spiritually minded live. And they would have 
found in the Old Testament two ideals stand¬ 
ing out in clear and majestic relief against much 
in the religion of the chosen people which was 

91 


92 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


merely a parallel to that of other peoples. They 
would have found the ideal of holiness, and that 
of sacrificial love—the two main themes of the 
prophets, the distinctive religious teachers of 
Jewry. Discovering and apprehending these 
ideals as a peculiar heritage of their faith, they 
could not but have recognized in Jesus the radi¬ 
ant and sublime fulfilment of them both, so that, 
instead of opposing our Lord’s claims upon the 
allegiance of their hearts, they would have 
yielded gladly to him, and followed him in the 
way of life more abundant. 

Eut these critics, like many other people who 
profess religion while missing its meaning, were 
materially minded. They were concerned with 
outward things rather than with inward states. 
So what they looked for in the Scriptures was a 
law of conduct, by following which they might 
be assured of special privileges at the hands of 
the Almighty; and a hope for their race, of at¬ 
taining dominion by force over other races. 
They had lost sight of religious idealism in con¬ 
centration upon a complex and mechanical legal¬ 
ism. Instead of love, they cherished hatred 
toward the non-Jewish world, with a sinister 
hope that they might some day by a miracle be 
so exalted in power as to be able to vent this 
hatred with impunity in cruel oppressions of 
Israel’s erstwhile conquerors. In searching the 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 


93 


Scriptures they gave their attention almost ex¬ 
clusively to the statutes therein contained, not 
markedly different from the legal enactments of 
other religions; and to the apocalyptic strain 
which developed late in Hebrew history as a 
protest, in a spirit of desperate and insane 
bravado, against the merited misfortunes to 
which Israel and Judah successively had fallen 
prey. They passed over lightly and without 
discernment the prophetic insistence upon right¬ 
eousness of the heart, because it gainsaid these 
other emphases which they preferred. And so, 
because Jesus stressed righteousness more than 
regulations, and could not and would not offer 
them military leadership for the conquest of the 
world, they scorned and condemned him in 
whom the authentic hope of Israel, as well as 
the very nature of the one true God, was incar¬ 
nate. 

A similar contrast is to be observed in the way 
in which men today approach the sacred writings 
of our faith, in their completed form, with the 
New Testament added to the Old. All Chris¬ 
tians believe that a divine light shines from the 
Scriptures. But the light we look for may he 
for either of two uses: outlook, or insight. If we 
go to the Bible seeking outlook upon mere facts 
otherwise ascertainable through diligent re¬ 
search, we are doomed to a certain degree at 


94 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


least of disappointment. For, though the Bible 
is doubtless more often right than not in its 
statements of fact, it is not by any means al¬ 
ways so. The materially minded Christian turns 
to the Scriptures as to a final authority upon 
certain chapters of history and certain aspects 
of science. When men investigate these chap¬ 
ters and these aspects through other sources in¬ 
dependently of the Bible, they discover that 
many Biblical statements cannot be verified, 
while some are irreconcilably contradicted by 
the conclusions of dispassionate and exact in¬ 
vestigation. Now a Christian who holds as an 
indispensable element of faith that the Scrip¬ 
tures are inerrant in all statements of fact, must, 
if he would keep his faith, deliberately reject the 
verdict of his senses in order to cling to the out¬ 
look which the Bible affords him upon these con¬ 
troverted matters. So he will come to believe 
that the dispassionate investigator is a godless 
man, with an animus against religion; he will 
refuse to familiarize himself with the results of 
such investigation, lest his mind be tainted by 
this appalling impiety; and he will cling with 
sullen, truth-defying stubbornness to the more 
extreme forms of the theology of the sixteenth 
century, even more distant from the spirit of 
Jesus in the first century than from the findings 
of science in the nineteenth and twentieth. 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 


95 


With such an outlook, a man can hardly live at 
peace with his more candid neighbors, but in the 
name of the Prince of Peace will inevitably find 
himself obliged to engage in endless embittered 
controversies. And I have known Christians of 
this sort whose minds were so twisted by accom¬ 
modation to their irrational position that they 
were guilty of actual dishonesty and falsehood 
in argument, wilfully misstating known truths 
and misquoting their adversaries in lamentably 
mistaken championship of the God of Truth. 

Suppose, however, that a man who goes to 
the Bible for outlook upon external facts, and 
who discovers that in this regard the Bible is 
not infallible, prefers—as it would seem that 
any honest man must prefer—the facts ascer¬ 
tained by research to the Scriptural allegations 
which research has disproved. He will then be 
prompted to discard the Bible entirely; to re¬ 
pudiate religion as an hallucination; and to be¬ 
come a propagandist against the spiritual 
interpretation of life, thus identified in his mind 
with exploded errors, in behalf of a cold, hard 
materialism. That is how many atheists are 
made. 

But obviously an approach to the Bible which, 
if consistently followed, will turn truth-seekers 
either into theological reactionaries or into 
enemies of religion, can hardly satisfy a man 


96 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


who believes in estimating statements of fact by 
factual standards; but who nevertheless cannot 
escape the conviction that in the Scriptures there 
are elements of inestimable value having noth¬ 
ing whatever to do with historical narratives or 
scientific theories. So he will look for an alter¬ 
native. And he will find it, as Jesus found it, 
in searching the Scriptures for insight into the 
deep meanings of human life, rather than for 
outlook upon its incidents and details. When 
one turns to the Bible for insight, one finds 
that it gives the light we seek; that it dis¬ 
pels the darkness of our souls as no other book 
can do. 

The first element of this insight which the 
Bible imparts to us is as to the moral experience 
of man himself. In the Bible we find, as no¬ 
where else that I know of, the terrible and glor¬ 
ious struggle of right against wrong in the 
human breast presented over and over again with 
compelling force and in imposing grandeur. 
Here we do not find, as for instance in the Greek 
dramatists, man represented as a mere play¬ 
thing of blind necessity, or of capricious gods; 
righteousness as a mere outward conformity to 
the arbitrary decrees of heaven; sin as a mere 
accidental or unwitting or ironically necessitated 
departure therefrom. We find man shown to be 
free, to choose between good and ill; good an 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 


97 


eternal principle, not alien to but identical with 
the genuine interest of man as a spiritual being; 
righteousness defined in terms, not of conduct 
but of the intention behind conduct; sin a dread¬ 
ful and tragic departure from the integrity of 
one’s very self, a step toward spiritual suicide. 
To know the mighty men of the Scriptures so 
well as to enter into the tension of their tre¬ 
mendous moral combats and the elation of their 
superb moral victories, is to achieve a discern¬ 
ment of the import of conscience in our own lives 
so clear that in this light we can never again 
court remorse by living carelessly, but must seek 
peace through obedience to the imperative of 
righteousness in our own bosoms. 

Second, we find in the Bible insight upon the 
relations of men with the Eternal. For we 
watch the knights of God in the Scriptures, not 
only fighting evil, but also at prayer, seeking 
and finding their King. We learn that their 
victories over sin were in their own thought in¬ 
separable from the strength which they derived 
from this divine communion. If prayer for us 
has meant chiefly a mechanical recitation of 
selfish demands in phrases consecrated by long, 
thoughtless usage; or if, in loose and superficial 
thinking about its significance, we have imagined 
prayer to be just a man talking to himself about 
his own aims and desires, from these flippant 


98 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


and degrading misconceptions we are delivered 
into a due sense of the reality and glorious op¬ 
portunity of true fellowship with Him who pre¬ 
sides over the stars and our destinies, through 
acquaintance with the effective prayer-life of the 
heroes of the Bible, and especially of the central 
and climactic figure of them all, our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

Third, the Bible gives us insight as to the 
character of God Himself. It does not merely 
declare as a metaphysical proposition that God 
is; it shows us the very being of God, as he re¬ 
vealed Himself more and more distinctly to suc¬ 
cessive generations of His faithful followers, 
until at length He translated Himself into the 
vocabulary of human living by taking our flesh in 
the Son of Mary. The figure of God is a grow¬ 
ing, changing figure in the Bible. At first there 
was only a remote, veiled Presence, so dimly 
discerned that men imagined all sorts of strange 
and awful things about Him. But, through the 
centuries of Israel’s development, the mists 
were ever clearing and lifting, so that God in 
Christ impresses us quite otherwise than does 
the God of wrath with whom Moses communed. 
Yet we feel that the two are indeed one; and 
that in the Scriptures we have discovered, not 
merely a theory, but the record of a progressive 
experience which, in the ways the Bible indicates, 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 


99 


can and must be brought to pass in our own 
hearts. 

The Bible is not, nor does it purport to be, a 
source of precise matter-of-fact outlook upon 
this passing world of shadows, its origin, and 
the succession of its major events. To go to the 
Bible with that notion of its light is to give evi¬ 
dence that one is materially minded, unawak¬ 
ened to the deeper issues of life. The Bible 
gives us, not outlook, but insight: insight into 
the meaning of man’s moral vicissitudes, the na¬ 
ture of man’s spiritual opportunity, and the 
character of God. But, in thus absolving the 
Bible from responsibility for uninterrupted 
historical and scientific veracity, what shall we 
do with the traditional conviction of the Church 
that the Scriptures are inspired? Does not in¬ 
spiration preclude error at any point, even of 
minor detail? 

The answer to that question depends upon 
what one understands by inspiration. If one 
supposes that God inspired the writers of this 
book in such a fashion that every word therein 
is God’s word, then one has specified not inspira¬ 
tion, but dictation; the writers of this book must 
have been, not seers, but stenographers. That 
God might have chosen this way of making His 
truth known can hardly be doubted. But, if He 
had done so, the resultant compilation from many 



100 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


pens in many centuries would be remarkable for 
two peculiarities of composition. First, the 
style throughout would be approximately uni¬ 
form ; that is, it would vary only within the range 
of one mind, with minor differences as different 
matters are discussed, but with major consist¬ 
ency of vocabulary and construction as well as 
of thought. Second, there would still be errors 
in the text—unless indeed the fingers of God’s 
amanuenses were miraculously controlled while 
they transcribed the dictation of the divine voice; 
for no stenographer has yet lived who never mis¬ 
spelt a word, or in place of the right word wrote 
a wrong word which sounded like it. But the 
resultant textual inaccuracies w T ould be of a me¬ 
chanical sort, not making sense. But neither of 
these peculiarities is to be found in the Scrip¬ 
tures. Though the general quality of their 
spiritual experience is the same, these writers 
are sometimes as far apart as the poles, not only 
in construction and vocabulary, but also upon 
some points of doctrine: witness St. Paul and 
St. James on the relative importance of faith 
and works. And the occasional errors as to 
matters of fact in their compositions do make 
sense, though they make the wrong sense. So, 
on internal evidence, we cannot accept that view 
of inspiration which identifies it with divine 
dictation of these writings. 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 101 


Our only remaining resource is to interpret 
the inspiration of the Bible in accordance with 
the usual meaning of the term as applied to 
artistic productions in other fields. If you have 
ever practised the art of letters, or any other of 
the fine arts, you know the difference between 
performing in a dull routine manner and per¬ 
forming in such a way as actually to surprise 
yourself by the felicity of every stroke. In this 
latter mood, carried to a higher degree than you 
and I have probably experienced it, is found 
what all are agreed in every other context save 
that of religion to regard as inspiration. Nor 
do I doubt that the artist who feels himself under 
an influence higher than his own consciousness is 
quite correct in that conviction, and ought to be 
moved by it to offer adoring gratitude to the 
Most High. I am confident that the Spirit of 
God is the spirit of beauty as well as of truth 
and of goodness; and that in certain creative 
moments all sincere workers are possessed of the 
Spirit of God, who brings out of the depths of 
their own experience, from hidden recesses 
which they have forgotten, resources and capa¬ 
bilities transforming their product out of some¬ 
thing dull and prosaic into a creation of celestial 
radiance and loveliness. But it is always out of 
the artist’s own experience that this beneficent 
Spirit brings these materials. In other words, 


102 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


a man writes or paints or carves in such a way 
as to quicken spiritual insight in others only 
when he has worked under the guidance of the 
Spirit of God, which gives him insight into the 
depths of his own being, where his soul is at one 
with the Eternal. So in the Bible I find writings 
of men who, knowing God in their own souls and 
dedicating their pens to His service, were used 
of God that through their pens the vital element 
of their own deepest experience should be in- 
spiringly offered to other seekers after Him. 
And that is true inspiration. 

Shall we, then, say that the Scriptures are 
just like any other writings by authors who felt 
themselves inspired, and who inspire us? Yes, 
if we want to put it that way, so far as the 
quality of their inspiration is concerned. I be¬ 
lieve that inspiration still occurs, in precisely the 
same way as it did for these ancient seers, in our 
time. Christlike character did not cease upon 
the earth when the Apostolic generation passed 
away to heaven; we do not think it unorthodox 
to expect Christlike characters in the twentieth 
century, nor impious, but just and proper, to 
acknowledge them when we do find them. In 
the same way, why should not God, who still 
reveals Himself to the hearts of His servants and 
through their characters to others, continue to 


LIGHT FROM THE SCRIPTURES 


103 


inspire men’s words so that their words shall 
inspire others? 

But a difference in degree, though not in 
quality, of inspiration there is, incalculably to 
the Bible’s advantage. Though there are Christ- 
like men and women in the twentieth century, 
they would be the first to acknowledge that su¬ 
preme spiritual achievement rests with the 
Apostolic church. Just so, though there are in¬ 
spired writers in the twentieth century, yet the 
quintessence of divine inspiration, concentrated 
at a moment of unique opportunity in the 
world’s history for the proclamation of the 
divine order, is to be found still, and I doubt not 
always will be recognized, in the Holy Scriptures 
of our faith. So manifestly and compellingly is 
this true that the Bible is, and will continue to 
be, prized by all who have familiarized them¬ 
selves with it, as the indispensable manual of 
godly living. It was written by men like us out 
of their own experience; for it is always through 
men that God speaks to men; that truth is il¬ 
lustrated by the Incarnation, as well as by the 
inspiration of the Scriptures. But the men who 
wrote the Bible were the supreme discoverers of 
spiritual truth; the value of their teachings, 
therefore, can never be superseded. In their way 
we must walk, if we would also know God; and 


104 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


we can only walk in their way by studying their 
words, to know what that way is. 

The Bible is not a book of outlook but of in¬ 
sight. If Jesus’ critics in his time had but 
realized that fact, had they been spiritually 
minded instead of materially minded, they would 
have recognized in Jesus the great Scriptural 
ideals of holiness and sacrificial love which were 
the principles of his living, and so would have 
claimed him as their Lord instead of rejecting 
him, to his and their own bitter woe. If we will 
go to the Bible looking for light on the deep 
meaning of human experience, we shall find 
what we seek; and in that discovery we shall 
know God for ourselves. With this understand¬ 
ing of the Bible’s aim and ministry, we of the 
twentieth century must remain devout and earn¬ 
est students of these holy teachings; for only by 
loyalty to the Bible can we hold ourselves true 
to that way of living, with God and for our 
fellow-men, in which is the secret of immortal 
blessedness. 


IX 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


We preach Christ crucified .— I Corinthians 1:23 

As every student of comparative religion 
knows, the attempt to define “religion” baffles 
while it attracts every writer on the subject. 
But there is value in the attempt to define such 
a great term as this, even though it be unsuccess¬ 
ful; at least it clarifies our thinking to cogitate 
on the complexities involved. To define Chris¬ 
tianity is not easier than to define religion. But 
we may derive benefit from approaching a def¬ 
inition of Christianity by seeking to identify, 
among the diverse elements of our faith and its 
expression, the nucleus of all its elements and 
emphases. For, however widely we may differ 
as to details of Christian creed and program, we 
shall be one at heart, if only we can agree as to 
what the heart of our religion is. 

It is often said that “Christians are the people 
of the Book”: that the Bible is the center of 
Christianity. There is assuredly much to justify 
this declaration. The Bible does occupy an im¬ 
pregnable position. It deserves to be revered, 

105 




106 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


and, moreover, to be studied. For it is the 
source-literature of that great historic process 
in which all Christian belief is rooted: the 
growth of a unique God-consciousness in Israel, 
through the Prophets, whose order reached its 
climax in the Prophet of Nazareth. If it were 
not for the Bible, we should not know God 
through the Prophets and Christ. A generation 
of Christians unacquainted with the Scriptures 
would soon cease to be Christian. 

Nevertheless, Christianity is not a religion of 
a book. For books at their best are not in them¬ 
selves vital, but only vehicles of vitality from the 
soul of the writer to the soul of the reader. A 
literary religion would be more literary than 
religious—as indeed Christianity, when its 
leaders have been obsessed with the centrality 
of the Bible, has sometimes seemed. Moreover, 
the Bible does not justify such extravagant 
claims as are made for it by those who see in it 
the nucleus of Christian faith. There can be 
no true respect without honesty. So we must 
honestly admit that the Bible is not one book 
but many books, by no means always in agree¬ 
ment of fact and theory among themselves, and 
of many grades of literary, historic and philo¬ 
sophical value. This book or library is, further¬ 
more, so ancient that with many problems of the 
modern world it makes no direct contact. The 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


107 


endeavor to vindicate for the Bible a position 
of supremacy in the thinking of all the faithful 
has led to a fallacious and depressing reaction¬ 
ism, pernicious to the authentic interests of the 
spiritual life. Perhaps, indeed, while studying 
the Bible with more attentive appreciation than 
ever before because of the heightened awareness 
of the modern mind of the debt of the present to 
the great achievements of the past, we would do 
well to forget the very terms “revelation” and 
“inspiration,” because of their conventional con¬ 
notation of all-sufficing inerrancy, as applied to 
the Holy Scriptures, and subject these writings 
without reserve to the canons of criticism applied 
to all other works of literature. 

Again, it is sometimes said, and still more 
often strongly implied, that Christianity is the 
religion of the Church. In this declaration a 
note is sounded more distinctive of Christian 
practice than the assertion that Christianity is 
the religion of a book. For other religions have 
other books, the source-literature of their several 
world-views; but, so far as I know, no other re¬ 
ligion has ever attached so much importance as 
ours does to the organization of a communal life 
of faith. In the Church, people of both sexes 
and all ages find an extension of the family tie, 
a domestic intimacy of religious fellowship, 
which stands alone among the institutions of 


108 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


world-religion—an unparalleled achievement of 
Christian strategy—singularly favorable to the 
heightening of religious experience, the 
strengthening of moral principle, the upbuild¬ 
ing of righteousness in the community, and the 
propagation of the faith. 

Yet the Church is assuredly not the central 
point of Christianity. A man can be a Christian 
without the Church; though in the Church he 
will usually be a better Christian. What gives 
the Church its distinction is a stronger and more 
intimate factor of our faith than any mere hu¬ 
man association, indwelling the Church. When 
that factor is absent or in partial eclipse, and the 
Church is regarded as existing in and for itself, 
all manner of defects present themselves, invit¬ 
ing the ruin of the Christian cause. For the 
Church is made up of fallible men and women. 
It can sometimes be, and has frequently been, 
manipulated to subserve the selfish ends of 
wealth, caste and oppression. Moreover, there 
is a tendency to self-absorption and smugness 
in the life of each separate Christian commun¬ 
ity, which promotes in its adherents the vice of 
arrogant and bitter hostility to all religious 
opinions and practices differing from its own. 

Against the notion that the Church is the cen¬ 
ter of Christianity, Protestantism was in its 
origin a necessary and heroic protest. Similar 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


109 


protests against an ecclesiastical bigotry in 
Protestantism, like that against which in the 
Mother Church Luther led the mighty revolt of 
the sixteenth century, have resulted in the multi¬ 
plication of the divisions of the Christian 
Church, until it seems as though the seamless 
robe were rent beyond restitution. Yet perhaps 
this divided state of Christendom is not alto¬ 
gether to be regretted. Perhaps organic unity, 
for which some of our co-religionists impatiently 
clamor, would, at the same time that it promoted 
efficiency, injure Christianity itself, and cheat 
its adherents of the fullness of faith, by bolster¬ 
ing up the theory that it is the Church that 
counts: that God is concerned first of all, in this 
world, for the Church, and that therefore to the 
Church each Christian should give his supreme 
loyalty. 

In contrast with these views, that the Bible is 
the center of Christian faith, and that the Church 
occupies that position, it is surely just to cite 
as a corrective the unanimous witness of the 
first Christians, as that witness recurs through¬ 
out the early Christian records, and is succinctly 
stated by St. Paul in our text. 

In St. Paul’s day, no man could make the mis¬ 
take of ascribing to the Bible first place; for 
the Bible did not yet exist. There was, to be 
sure, the Old Testament. But its canon was not 


110 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


to be determined until the last decade of the 
first century, and then by a council, not of Chris- 
tion ministers, but of Jewish rabbis! In inter¬ 
preting the Old Testament scriptures, moreover, 
Jesus had set his disciples an example of free¬ 
dom which they followed to such lengths that we 
are unable to find any ground, other than their 
own unbridled fancy, for their exegesis of some 
Old Testament passages. And of course there 
was as yet no New Testament. Its sections 
were just being composed. No one knows when 
the work was completed; but it cannot have been 
until long after the Church had begun to func¬ 
tion vigorously. 

Nor could any Christian in that day suppose 
that the Church occupied the place of honor. 
For the Church was in an inchoate state, with 
no standards of official authority, with almost 
as many types of organization as there were in¬ 
dividual congregations, and with no administra¬ 
tive tie binding them in unity save their common 
personal relations with the Apostles and other 
itinerant evangelists. 

So the inescapable logic of historic circum¬ 
stance preserved the early Christians from these 
errors of bibliolatry and of ecclesiasticism. 
They were not even tempted to assign first place 
to any other element of Christianity than Christ 
himself—for its testimony to whom, we cherish 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


111 


the Bible; for its service to whom, we honor the 
Church: “We preach Christ crucified.” 

Sometimes Christ crucified has been preached 
in such a way as to lose sight of the man Jesus. 
It was a one-sided stress upon Christ the King 
and Judge, the eternal Second Person in the 
Holy Trinity, in almost entire disregard of his 
earthly life, and with a scrupulous preference 
for texts from the Old Testament, the later 
epistles, and the Apocalypse, to the neglect of 
the four Gospels, which occasioned the Unita¬ 
rian movement, with its strenuous and equally 
one-sided insistence upon the genuine humanity 
of Jesus Christ. But no such extravagant em¬ 
phasis upon their Lord’s deity was likely to oc¬ 
cur among the early Christians. When they 
acknowledged Christ as Eternal King, it was 
because of what they knew about Christ Jesus, 
the man in God’s likeness. Even St. Paul, who 
had not known Jesus in the flesh, was much 
guided in his Christological speculations by his 
thorough familiarity with the reports of eye¬ 
witnesses of Christ incarnate. Therefore we are 
safe in asserting that to the first generation of 
the faithful Christianity was, and so to all sub¬ 
sequent generations it should be, the religion of 
a man. 

Now that opens at once new perspectives of in¬ 
terest and attractiveness in the Christian faith. 


112 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


For if men are to make up their minds about 
Christianity in response to the query, “What 
think ye of the Bible?” they must test the Bible 
by literary and historical standards, and will 
often find it wanting. If the query is to be, in¬ 
stead, “What think ye of the Church?” their 
judgment may reasonably be more emphatically 
one of disapprobation than in the previous in¬ 
stance. But when Christianity is identified with 
the life, example and spirit of a man—when the 
query becomes, “What think ye of Christ?”— 
then their interest will be more acute and more 
immediate than it could be in religious literature 
or religious organization; for the life of a man 
is vital, while these are artificial. And we are 
confident that upon the historic Jesus the ver¬ 
dict of any open-minded student can only be one 
of reverence and acclaim. 

To be sure, the quest of the historic Jesus 
presents many difficulties. But sober historical 
science, while in doubt about many details, is in 
no doubt whatever about the main lines of Jesus’ 
teaching and character, and of his career before 
the public. And St. Paul has touched the throb¬ 
bing pulse of Jesus’ significance in this laconic 
phrase, pregnant with paradox, “Christ cruci¬ 
fied”: that is to say, a king, slain; that is to say, 
a man superb and commanding in the quality of 
his living, and never more regal than in what to 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


113 


all appearances constituted utter defeat. For 
in this paradox we find what the hungry hearts 
of mankind are above all looking for: the as¬ 
sertion that life is more than the body—that the 
soul counts for more than do things; that a realm 
of spiritual and eternal reality is accessible to 
the children of earth, irrespective of their earthly 
conditions; that, indeed, pain and ruin may be 
the gateway to this wider, richer realm of right¬ 
eousness, truth, and abiding and abundant life. 

So our religion—the religion of a man— 
makes a vital appeal, especially to those who 
hunger and thirst after righteousness. In the 
cross they are given to discern a principle of 
reconciliation, despite their sins, shortcomings 
and follies, with the meaning, the heart, the liv¬ 
ing center of all being. A book can only impart 
ideas; a Church can only sponsor movements; 
our hearts know that a man, and that man by 
suffering made perfect, can give the life that is 
in him to them who follow him. 

Further, the life of Jesus Christ, the central 
theme and urge of Christendom, answers to the 
altruistic idealism in the hearts of all men of 
good will. One of the most encouraging phases 
of current thinking, in this time when many de¬ 
clare religion to be at low ebb, is that every so¬ 
cial reformer, however cranky and ill-advised 
his projects may be, alleges that they are based 


114 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


upon the teachings of Jesus; because he rejoices 
to find indubitable justification for his under¬ 
lying motive, with however unwise a program 
it may be linked, in the spirit of Jesus. The 
very radicalism of our time is saturated with the 
intention to follow Jesus; and its exponents 
sometimes give evidence that they would follow 
him, if necessary, even so far as the cross. Is 
there not in this fact a wonderful promise of 
Christ’s triumph ? 

Not only does the life of Jesus, the focal point 
of Christian devotion, correspond to the deep¬ 
est of man’s moral impulses; but also it chal¬ 
lenges the intellects of all who will weigh it 
honestly, as no other life does, so that to follow 
him is no fanatical decision, but is at least recog¬ 
nized by all thoughtful and informed people as 
rationally defensible. Again let me cite a cur¬ 
rent interest in Jesus, far more widespread than 
the influence of the Church which functions in 
his name; but of a different sort: the world’s 
thinkers today are thinking about Jesus. In il¬ 
lustration of this interest I think of two extraor¬ 
dinary books of recent years, by men of no great 
profundity indeed, but fairly representative of 
the current intellectual type. Papini’s “ Story 
of Christ” is of no value as a contribution to 
history or Christology; it is deliberately extrava¬ 
gant and credulous. But it is of great moment 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


115 


as showing us, especially in the concluding 
“Prayer to Christ” omitted from the English 
translation, a man, saturated in twentieth-cen¬ 
tury sophistication, who, finding no satisfaction, 
even for his mind, in this culture of disillusion¬ 
ment, has therefore brought his wits, such as 
they are—the world esteems them more highly 
than I do—to the service of Christ. Mr. J. 
Middleton Murry’s “Jesus, Man of Genius” 
emanates from a mind as brilliant as that of 
Papini, and better balanced. From the editor 
of the London Athenaeum the literary world ex¬ 
pected, by the gauge of his past performances, 
a supercilious and perhaps even sarcastic treat¬ 
ment of the supreme human personality. But, 
instead, Mr. Murry, with all his detachment 
from those spiritual convictions which we honor 
as religious but which he would decry as super¬ 
stitious, nevertheless professes himself, while 
unable to accept Jesus as God made man, an 
avowed adherent of Jesus as man made God, 
and has written perhaps the most reverent and 
beautiful biography of the Master ever com¬ 
posed by one who does not grant his deific 
claims. 

Thus the life of Jesus appeals to the hearts of 
men who long for purity in their own lives and 
for justice in the social order. It challenges and 
overmasters the intellects of men, whatever their 


116 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


metaphysical views, who apply the utmost acu¬ 
men of modern learning to the interpretation of 
his character and precepts. Therefore, if we 
will be propagandists of Christ rather than of 
the Church or the Bible, we may expect at least 
a respectful hearing. And we shall not find it 
hard to lead men forth, from this preliminary 
respect for the figure we present, into a faith 
in the eternal and invisible God, like that of him 
for whom they profess such respect. This is, 
after all, the chief worth for human thought of 
the life of Jesus: not that it presents an example, 
specifies a principle, cogent for men of every 
race in every age; but that it inspires by that 
example a sympathetic and receptive interest in 
the attitude toward the mystery of the universe, 
or rather in the conscious fellowship with the 
loving Lord of the universe, which sustained him 
in and for his incomparable moral achievement, 
so that to honor Christ crucified, and vindicating 
spiritual values by his paradoxical triumph on 
the cross, leads out into faith in God the Father, 
and hope of His mercies, like the faith and hope 
which underlay Christ’s fortitude on Calvary. 

We have not defined Christianity. We shall 
not ever agree as to all the details of this ancient 
and widely diversified system of faith and prac¬ 
tice. But I trust that we have at least clarified 
our thought as to the center, the vital nucleus, of 


THE RELIGION OF JESUS 


117 


Christianity. That nucleus is not a book; 
though the book of our faith is precious. It is 
not a Church; though the fellowship of believers 
one with another, and their organized coopera¬ 
tion in furtherance of their common cause, are 
invaluable. It is a man—a king—and that king 
slain, yet in his dying proving to the conscience 
of the world, as no fine-wrought argument could 
demonstrate it, that it is not things but souls, 
that it is not gains but principles, which in the 
last instance count. In this fact, that Chris¬ 
tianity is the religion of a man, and such a man 
as Jesus, is to be found the secret of its perennial 
charm for all men everywhere, and the hope of 
its ultimate conquest over evil in the establish¬ 
ment of a regimen of righteousness throughout 
the world. 


X 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 

The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of 
God. — St. Mark 1:1 

It is interesting to note the contrast in the in¬ 
troductions of their narratives by the four Evan¬ 
gelists ; not only interesting, but also instructive. 
The first and third Gospels give us the beauti¬ 
ful nativity stories, so precious to the Christian 
imagination. The fourth Gospel, in its magni¬ 
ficent prologue, sketches a profound philosophy 
of the cosmic relations of him whose story it 
tells. This second Gospel, the oldest of them 
all, has neither a metaphysical theory nor an ac¬ 
count of the birth of our Lord to preface its 
narrative of his words and works, but simply the 
terse phrase quoted above, in which the conclud¬ 
ing and most significant words, “the Son of 
God,” are perhaps an interpolation, as they are 
lacking in some of the early manuscripts. Yet 
this Gospel of St. Mark was set forth and ac¬ 
cepted as, in the opinion of the Apostolic 
Church, sufficing for the religious guidance of 
all who would follow Jesus. This implies that 

its author and his readers did not feel the need 
118 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


119 


of a philosophical interpretation of the person 
of Christ, nor of any detailed information con¬ 
cerning the beginning of his life. In view of the 
tremendous emphasis placed upon the doctrine 
of the Virgin Birth by many later thinkers, this 
is indeed surprising. It leads us to ask whether 
such an emphasis is, after all, necessary or ad¬ 
visable. The Virgin Birth is nowhere in the 
Bible directly referred to, save in the introduc¬ 
tory passages of the first and third Gospels, 
known by the names of St. Matthew and St. 
Luke respectively. There is no reference to it 
in any recorded sermon of an Apostle, although 
such terms as “The Son of God” and “The 
Only-Begotten” are familiarly applied through¬ 
out the early Christian literature to Jesus. But 
these terms are obviously susceptible of expla¬ 
nation as indicating a spiritual rather than a 
physical affiliation of the Savior to the Heavenly 
Father—the adjective “only-begotten” being 
then employed metaphorically to indicate a spe¬ 
cial and unique relationship, as contrasted with 
the general truth that all men are God’s chil¬ 
dren. And not a few reverent and competent 
students of the New Testament maintain that 
the nativity stories are later additions to the 
Gospels of which they now form a part, addi¬ 
tions composed as imaginative elucidations of 
these familiar terms. 


120 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


Whether that be the case or not, I suppose we 
shall never be in a position to decide. The ques¬ 
tion as to the way in which the earthly life of 
Jesus began is a question of fact, upon which at 
this distance we cannot from the historical stand¬ 
point dogmatically pass, in either sense. Cer¬ 
tainly the nativity stories are beloved by all 
Christians. As certainly, there are insuperable 
difficulties attendant upon any attempt to har¬ 
monize the story as told by St. Matthew with 
the form in which St. Luke presents it. As cer¬ 
tainly again, even such a miracle as the Virgin 
Birth would be possible to Almighty God. But 
St. Mark’s omission of all mention of it should 
lead us to ask ourselves seriously whether in any 
way it adds to our faith that Christ is the Son 
of God, to believe that he had no earthly father; 
whether, indeed, great stress upon the allegation 
that he had no earthly father, as essential to 
sound faith, be not disconcertingly materialistic 
in tone; whether, since St. Mark and St. John 
could write the Gospel and all the Apostles 
could preach it without ever raising the point, 
we would not do better to pass it over in silence, 
with frank uncertainty about it, and to rest our 
appeal in behalf of Christ where he himself rests 
it, upon the character of the man rather than 
upon an alleged supernatural distinction setting 
him off from birth from the rest of mankind. 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


121 


with whom he deliberately, in all other points 
save sin, sought to identify himself. 

In fifteen verses, including this brief introduc¬ 
tory verse, St. Mark carries us through the 
period of the preparation of the Gospel and the 
actual beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The first 
of the episodes in this supremely significant 
series of the antecedents of redemption, is the 
preaching of St. John Baptist. There are three 
aspects of this preaching which we shall do well 
to note. 

First, the man himself St. John Baptist was 
an eccentric, a typical ascetic, who had sepa¬ 
rated himself from the common life of men, 
brought his body by mortifying measures into 
servile subjection, and was exemplifying a way 
of life which for all men to follow would mean 
the destruction of society. This way of life was 
in startling contrast not only with general prac¬ 
tice but also with the subsequent example of 
Jesus himself, who was a normal man among 
men. The prevalence of the ascetic ideal in the 
medieval Church, in which it was presented as 
the noblest type of spiritual character, was an 
element of weakness fruitful of corruption. We 
find in ourselves very little sympathy indeed 
with, such eccentricities. Yet Providence em¬ 
ployed St. John Baptist as the forerunner of 
Jesus, a special man, of a special sort, for a 


122 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


special task. And Providence is always doing 
much the same thing, raising up peculiar indi¬ 
viduals for peculiar responsibilities. To medi¬ 
tate upon this fact, of which every notable era 
in history is illustrative, is to learn more toler¬ 
ance than we usually entertain for people whose 
way of living is other than our own. It is no 
sufficient ground of condemnation that a man 
is found refusing to conform to the accepted 
norm of behavior in the world. While we may 
well be thankful that to most of us is given a 
reasonable measure of companionable likeness to 
other men, yet, especially in a time when this is 
so prevalent as to threaten the reduction of hu¬ 
man nature to a monotonous level, however 
high, we shall be wise to be tolerant rather than 
hostile and minatory toward the exceptional per¬ 
son who stands out from the crowd, like St. 
John Baptist, notable for his oddity. To men¬ 
tion but one relatively recent example, Abraham 
Lincoln was odd to the point of being prepos¬ 
terous in his social relations. But Abraham 
Lincoln, like St. John Baptist, was raised up 
for a special work which no other sort of man 
could do. That may be true of some of the queer 
people whom we dislike for their queerness. 
Perhaps God made them that way for a pur¬ 
pose! 

Second, the method of preaching which St. 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


123 


John Baptist used was equally unusual. He 
was, in the terminology of our own time, a re¬ 
vivalist. He was not an intellectual preacher, 
he was not a settled teacher; he was a voice cry¬ 
ing in the wilderness, crying so shrilly that 
people went to hear him out of curiosity, if for 
no better reason. But he had a real message 
for them. His country at that time needed a 
revivalist; and no intellectual preacher could 
have met that need. Frankly, I do not like re¬ 
vivalists in general; nor, I am sure, do you. 
They irritate me; they do not otherwise move 
me at all. Many of them are vulgar, or worse; 
for the evangelistic method, so-called, is avail¬ 
able for and employed by many men whose de¬ 
gree of culture and whose moral quality render 
them unfitted and unacceptable for sustained 
and constructive tasks in the ministry. But, 
again, as unique individuals are sometimes re¬ 
quired for extraordinary occasions, so extraor¬ 
dinary methods like this are sometimes needed 
to stir people up who have lapsed, as had these 
Jews who were in the prophet John’s shifting 
audiences, into a state of religious coma. Re¬ 
vivalism has not always been in our own country 
at its present low ebb. I have an idea that be¬ 
fore another Reformation comes we shall see 
revivalism restored to respectability by the ac¬ 
cession of a higher and more consecrated type of 


124 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


preachers to this ministry. It is bitter medicine; 
but sometimes the world needs bitter medicine. 
Grievous disorders cannot always be cured by 
sugar pills. If there is any criticism more de¬ 
served than all others by the present state of the 
Church—and as a consistent liberal and univer- 
salist I feel justified in proffering it—it is that 
most of our preaching is too sweet, too easy, not 
urgent enough on the consciences of the careless 
masses. 

Third, there was a beautiful humility about 
St. John Baptist. He knew that he had not the 
last word to say. He was preparing his hearers 
for one who would come after him, and who 
would be greater than he. Most men would 
have been depressed by that certainty. Some 
men would have felt that it was hardly worth 
while to do their best, if all they could possibly 
accomplish was to be subordinate to effects 
which another would achieve. But only little 
men would feel that way. John proved his 
greatness by his modesty. He was willing, 
proud, eager to do no more than arrange the 
preliminaries and set the stage for the great 
drama of the Gospel which would presently be 
enacted, after he himself should be out of sight. 
Many of us are conscious of similar limitations 
upon our opportunities and abilities. We know 
that no supreme accomplishment is to be ex- 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


125 


pected of us. Shall we, then, be disheartened? 
Always one greater than we is to come, and 
always that greater one must project his per¬ 
sonality against the background of our incon¬ 
spicuous labors. He who demands the first 
place for himself, and refuses to do his part if 
he cannot have first place, degrades himself by 
this very pride, whereas, by consecrating him¬ 
self in conquest of his pride, he might ennoble 
his character, and perhaps even perpetuate his 
memory, as did St. John Baptist. 

The second episode in this series is the bap¬ 
tism of our Lord, with the great spiritual experi¬ 
ence which came to him upon that occasion. 
Why should Jesus have been baptized, under 
John’s preaching of repentance, unto the remis¬ 
sion of sin? Had Jesus sins to repent of? All 
that we know of him, as well as the tradition 
cherished in his Church, confirms us in the con¬ 
viction that this man was without stain of guilt 
upon his conscience. But, as St. John Baptist 
was willing to humble himself that Jesus might 
be exalted, so Jesus, the exalted one, was will¬ 
ing to humble himself that he might, by con¬ 
forming to the practice of all other good men 
with the like opportunity, identify himself with 
them in their thought; meet them on their own 
level, without compromise of his own character; 
merge himself with the mass, that he might bet-. 


126 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ter raise the mass, instead of standing above the 
mass in a discouraging attitude of spiritual con¬ 
descension. Sometimes we pastors meet worthy 
people who are not Church members because, 
they say, they can be equally good Christians 
without* such membership. Perhaps they can. I 
doubt it; but I want to yield the point, that upon 
the example of Jesus in receiving baptism I may 
meet their argument in terms of their own al¬ 
leged perfection. If the sinless Christ thought 
best to join a penitential movement in order to 
be at one with the other men of his time who, 
though needing repentance, sought as he did to 
establish righteousness on earth, will any man 
in our time who professes to honor Jesus as his 
exemplar hold aloof from the society in which 
alone right-minded people consolidate their en¬ 
ergies for the more effective accomplishment of 
the aims which such an one must seek? 

Perhaps, if these, who are already so good 
that they do not need the Church, would follow 
in the footsteps of the Savior as he with volun¬ 
tary self-humiliation accepts baptism, to them 
there might come, as there came to him, some 
higher blessing than has yet been vouchsafed, in 
acknowledgment of their brotherly feeling. For 
it was at this moment, when he had performed 
an action which from the standpoint of his own 
personality was superfluous, but from the un- 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


127 


selfish standpoint was immeasurably advanta¬ 
geous, that “he saw the heavens rent asunder and 
the Spirit as a dove descending upon him, and a 
voice came out of the heavens, ‘This is my be¬ 
loved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ ” The 
suggestion is strong—and this has some bear¬ 
ing on our first point concerning the nature of 
Jesus’ divine sonship—that it was through this 
experience that he first knew himself as the Son 
of God. However this may be, certainly there 
is an indication here of rapture which came be¬ 
cause a soul was ready for it. And such rapture 
has an infinitely stimulating influence upon the 
soul. We need today men and women who will 
see visions and experience mystic ecstasies, in¬ 
duced, not by artificial over-stimulation of the 
religious imagination, but by treading the path 
of duty constantly and with faith. We have, 
alas, too many, I sometimes fear, of whom it 
may be charitably said that religion comes to 
them in accordance with an inadvertent emenda¬ 
tion of this text by a theological student who, 
in a recent paper, by a mistake of one letter on 
his typewriter, was led to speak of “the Spirit 
as a doze descending upon him.” Doubtless 
that explains the people who sleep in Church! 

It was just at this point that the third great 
episode occurred: the temptation of Jesus. Of 
that temptation I shall not now speak at any 


128 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


length, but shall mention only this aspect of it: 
that, since temptation came to the sinless one 
just after his greatest spiritual experience, we 
are not to be discouraged about our spiritual 
state when temptation comes to us. I have 
known Christians who were ashamed to be 
tempted, who thought that the very fact that in¬ 
sinuating suggestions of evil sometimes entered 
their consciousness was a proof that they were 
far from God. Nothing of the sort. Usually, 
I think, the hardest temptations to overcome 
come to the people most able to overcome them, 
just as the severest trials frequently come to 
people whose character qualifies them to sur¬ 
mount them. This is because there are certain 
problems, increasing in difficulty as one ad¬ 
vances spiritually, which must be solved on the 
way to perfection; and we are not prepared for 
the harder problems until we have already at¬ 
tained some measure of advancement! 

And then—John’s ministry concluded with his 
betrayal, Jesus’ baptism accomplished, his vis¬ 
ion achieved, his temptation conquered—the Son 
of God and of Man began his redemptive min¬ 
istry. He began it with a high and holy sense of 
elation: “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom 
of God is at hand.” I wonder if he foresaw at 
that moment clearly that to inaugurate the 
Kingdom he must lay down his earthly life. 


BEGINNING OF THE GOSPEL 


129 


Certainly that understanding came to him long 
before he made the supreme sacrifice; yet never 
throughout his subsequent career do we fail to 
hear this joyous and triumphant overtone in all 
of his preaching: “The Kingdom of God is at 
hand.” And how were men to receive the 
Kingdom, to promote its establishment, to co¬ 
operate in its successive victories? “Repent ye, 
and believe in the good tidings!” The verb “to 
repent” means literally “to turn about one’s 
mind,” to change one’s viewpoint. Is not that 
always the condition for receiving new and 
larger blessings from God? What is there that 
comes between us and His bounty save that we 
turn our minds away from Him? Is not the 
Kingdom of God always at hand for them who 
look toward that Kingdom rather than toward 
the kingdoms of this world? The Gospel which 
began with this message has not yet been ful¬ 
filled ; the Kingdom is not yet ascendant over all 
the affairs of men, as surely some day it shall 
be. But still the invitation stands: “Change 
your viewpoint!” That is, look away from self 
and the passions of self to God and the service 
of God; from hatred to love, from time to the 
eternal hope; and great things, of ineffable 
glory, shall be accomplished in your sight. 

After all, it is because I believe in this urgent 
invitation and its special cogency for a time so 


130 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


materially-minded as our own that I have just 
said a word in behalf of revivalism. I hope in 
my life-time to see, upon the foundation of a 
sane and defensible theology, centering as all 
Christian thinking must do in the benign and 
luminous person of Jesus, a revival of religion 
sweep this land. While the only people to at¬ 
tempt such a revival are people who think in 
the terms of sixteenth century dogmatism, this 
cannot occur. But when we Christians who are 
liberal enough to love new truth, and at the same 
time loyal enough to keep ever in the fellowship 
of him who is the same yesterday, today and 
forever, undertake this vivid ministry of con¬ 
version and reconciliation, then I am confident 
that problems will be solved and progress 
achieved for our nation and the world in ways 
we have no reason to hope for while light and 
warmth so seldom accompany one another in re¬ 
ligious experience, and the world so eagerly in¬ 
dulges its mad lust after things—forgetful of 
the eternal principles of spiritual life, as they 
have been set forth once for all in the blessed 
Gospel of Jesus Christ. 


XI 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


They have chosen their own ways .— Isaiah 66:3 

This is a clause of a terrific indictment of the 
enemies of God who had introduced corrupt 
practices into the religion of Israel. It does not 
raise the question of their responsibility. It 
takes it for granted that men are free to choose 
between good and evil, so that an evil choice 
merits reprehension and punishment. And we 
feel instinctively that this is true; that, despite 
all onslaughts of malice and adverse circum¬ 
stance, at bottom every man is free, to make or 
mar his own character. 

Nevertheless, the question as to whether the 
freedom of the will is real or a delusion has often 
been raised. It used to come up chiefly in con¬ 
nection with the theological concept of God’s 
omnipotence. If God has all power, how can 
we have any power? This consideration has led 
many students of religion to pronounce man a 
slave, and his boasted liberty of choice a mere 
futile and pathetic misunderstanding of his true 
relation to the universe. The classic names in 

131 


132 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


the history of this depressing view are St. Paul 
(in certain aspects of his teachings), St. Au¬ 
gustine and Calvin. According to these theolo¬ 
gians, and many who accept their conclusions, 
man is a puppet and God pulls the strings. 

Nowadays, however, the question whether 
man be slave or free occurs most frequently in 
connection with science. The natural sciences 
proceed upon the hypothesis that cause and ef¬ 
fect are not only uniform in the physical realm, 
but that the law of causality applies to the 
whole range of nature, including the so-called 
spiritual. So we have biologists who interpret 
every human event in terms of the mastery of 
heredity and environment over the individual; 
historians who attribute a similar coercive do¬ 
minion to economic necessity over the mass 
movements of mankind; and psychologists— 
especially the behaviorist school—who plausibly 
represent human consciousness and its decisions 
as inert results of compelling natural forces. 
According to this view, man is a machine, and 
brute Nature pulls the levers. 

Now I do not propose to deny that determin¬ 
ism—the doctrine that man only seems to be 
free, and is in fact enslaved to God or nature— 
is more logical than the claim that man’s free¬ 
dom is real. But I am suspicious of logic when 
it flies in the face of common sense. To be sure. 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


133 


our common-sense judgments about many 
things have to be corrected by scientific observa¬ 
tion. But a valid analysis of common-sense im¬ 
pressions must authenticate those impressions 
for practical purposes even though impugning 
their ultimate accuracy. Thus the Copernican 
astronomy tells us that the earth moves around 
the sun, but nevertheless leaves us sunrise and 
sunset for everyday use. The resolution of mat¬ 
ter by physics into atomic energy, probably elec¬ 
trical in type, leaves us nevertheless stone and 
wood to build our houses with. But determin¬ 
ism, by denying the reality of free will, takes 
away from us all confidence in our capacity to 
choose good or evil, and therewith all incentive 
to do our best. So we must insist that, though 
there be no room in a logical system for God, or 
natural causation, and free will at the same 
time, we must in the interest of truth as attested 
by practical efficiency rise above mere logic, and 
view logic as simply a convenient systematiza¬ 
tion of phenomena for certain defined ends 
within a strictly limited range, but beyond that 
range incompetent to interpret the world aright. 

But this leaves us with a paradox. We can¬ 
not in any given instance successfully contest the 
operation of the law of causality; we will not 
withhold from God our recognition of His omnip¬ 
otence. Yet we must maintain, for we know 


134 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


more deeply than we know anything else, that 
our wills are free. This involves a contradiction 
in terms. But what of it? Any explanation of 
life which covers the whole ground smoothly and 
without a break must leave out the vast factor 
of the unknown, which every man with a rea¬ 
sonable and decent modesty as to the present 
reach of the human intellect will acknowledge as 
hedging in the little field of truth which is open 
to our exhaustive investigation. So conscious 
have I become of this paradoxical aspect of life 
as it really is that I am suspicious of any pre¬ 
tended system which is logical throughout, and 
find in this suspicion a stronger argument than 
in any attempt at philosophical refutation. 
When a socialist, for instance, or an absolute 
idealist, brings his scheme of things entire to 
me and wants to persuade me to accept it, I do 
not try to pick flaws in his arguments; I am con¬ 
tent just to draw his attention to the fact that 
he is altogether too logical; that in the interest 
of his logic he has left out certain actual ele¬ 
ments of experience which, though irreconcilable 
with any man-made scheme and unintelligible to 
our present understanding, must nevertheless be 
admitted and reckoned with. 

As a matter of fact, it is probable that most 
people who deny that our wills are free do so 
in part, at least, to excuse their own faults and 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


135 


shortcomings. It is an old device to blame one’s 
own sins upon some one else. Adam in the gar¬ 
den blamed his fall on Eve; and Eve blamed 
hers on the serpent. St. Paul, in that impres¬ 
sive passage in the Roman epistle, in which he 
describes the torment of the divided soul, lapses 
into a convenient determinism when he says: “So 
now it is no more I that do it, but sin which 
dwelleth in me.” Throughout the Middle Ages 
sinners blamed their transgressions upon the 
devil and his fiends. Poor old devil! As 
shorthand for the destructive forces in the uni¬ 
verse he still holds a picturesque place in our 
thoughts; as a real personality I do not believe 
that he exists. But even if there be a devil in 
very truth, yet all he can do is to influence us 
toward evil; he cannot compel our wills. And 
the same holds for those modern substitutes for 
demons as the responsible agents of human ac¬ 
tion, inherited tendencies, abnormal glandular 
secretions, and complexes. The influence of 
these and other similar factors—the persuasion 
which they exercise upon us—cannot be gainsaid. 
But, be it ever remembered, influence is one 
thing, compulsion quite another. 

Perverse and depressing influences from 
whatever source constitute the opposition to our 
achievement of sound moral ideals, which we in¬ 
tuitively identify with our own essential and en- 


136 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


during interest. But it is well that we have 
opposition. For without opposition we should 
never have occasion to exercise our powers, and 
to develop them through exercise. The saints 
have not been men and women to whom good¬ 
ness came easy. Conversely, people to whom 
goodness comes easy are not the stuff that saints 
are made of, because they lack that vigor of per¬ 
sonality which underlies all distinction of 
character. A football team does not enjoy play¬ 
ing against a rival team which is so weak and 
ill-disciplined that the winning team rolls up a 
tremendous score almost automatically; a good 
game, from the standpoint of players as well as 
observers, is only possible when the opposing 
forces are more evenly matched. Likewise in 
the game of life it is good that our temptations 
should be strong; for then only will we develop 
moral skill—the art of right living—by hitting 
the line hard. 

We are, then, not slaves but free men and 
women. Our first reaction to that realization 
should be one of exhilaration. For it means that 
nobody can control us in our own despite. Our 
bodies and our estates may be subject to other 
people; but the hardest master cannot dictate 
our thoughts, or the spirit in which we obey his 
commands. Nowhere is this principle more tell¬ 
ingly evinced than on the cross of Christ. The 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


137 


body of our blessed Lord was at the disposal of 
his enemies; if he had surrendered his spirit to 
their disposal also, his crucifixion would long 
since have been lost from sight as just one of the 
innumerable legal murders of history. Because 
his spirit rose in triumphant defiance against the 
masters of his body, his cross is the symbol of 
the redemption of human personality through 
the ages. 

But this declaration of inner and essential in¬ 
dependence puts a burden on us which some of 
us are reluctant to bear. We can no longer 
blame anyone but ourselves if we serve wrong 
motives and do evil deeds. It is up to us to 
choose. It is a sobering thought, as we make 
that choice, that our thoughts and actions must 
affect many others besides ourselves, through our 
influence upon them. But it is we who will 
have to take the major consequences, and who 
will richly deserve them, whether they be of re¬ 
ward or of penalty. 

Since we are free, we do not have to do the 
bidding of our appetites. Our appetites belong 
to us; we do not belong to them. The coward 
will follow his passions, and then try to sneak 
out of his guilt by alleging that they were too 
strong for him. But the brave man will, if he 
has sinned, acknowledge that he did so because 
he was foolish enough to prefer immediate satis- 


138 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


faction or advantage to the longer, deeper 
gladness of self-respect grounded in moral 
achievement. And for the future he will be on 
his guard lest his passions score again—actually 
rejoicing in the recurrence of acute conflict be¬ 
cause he know T s that he could not suffer a pow¬ 
erful temptation unless he had a powerful will 
to cope with it, and that if he keeps on coping 
with it adequately long enough the temptation 
will be played out. 

Again, our freedom means that we need not 
be slaves of habit. Most of us have now, or have 
at some time had, some habit of which we are 
ashamed and in which we no longer find even 
the delusion of pleasure, but which has become 
so ingrained, as we say, that we yield to it with¬ 
out any resistance, as though it had come to stay. 
But that is utterly unnecessary. It betokens 
moral indolence. If we want to, we can pull 
ourselves up short, and step out of the down¬ 
ward groove of the inane, degrading repetition 
of past errors, and take our stand on a firm 
footing of uncompromising self-discipline. 

Not only can we cease to do evil, if we will; 
we can also learn to do well. On any day, when 
we really make up our minds to it, we can start 
a whole new train of habits, of which we need 
not be ashamed, and by which we shall be both 
helping other people and promoting our own 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


139 


spiritual progress. Sometimes we beguile our¬ 
selves into moral inertia by entertaining the no¬ 
tion that when presently some big and dramatic 
opportunity for right action presents itself, then 
we shall make the new start of which we are in 
need. But it is extremely improbable that any 
such opportunity will ever arrive, unless we 
make the new start right away, and go forward 
to meet it. We have a way of overlooking com¬ 
monplace opportunities for right action which 
our familiar surroundings afford us every day. 
But commonplace opportunities are just as 
fruitful as extraordinary ones, if our hearts are 
set on righteousness. 

Thus we are at liberty to achieve that positive 
growth in understanding and usefulness which 
is the corollary of a refusal to continue in wrong 
ways, and which betokens the fulfilment of the 
purpose of our life upon the earth. We can do 
this, whatever be the limitations upon our lot. 
To be sure, it may be that we cannot remove our 
limitations. But we can grow in spite of them, 
as ivy grows over stones and in their chinks and 
crannies, though it cannot grow through them. 
Blind men may not recover their sight; but 
blind men have achieved seats in the United 
States senate on their merits. Invalids may not 
recover their health; but one of the most useful 
men I ever knew had been bed-ridden, when last 


140 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


I saw him, for eighteen years. Deaf men may 
not regain their hearing; but Mr. Ernest Elmo 
Calkins, whose essays have brought delight to 
so many readers in recent years, is, despite the 
handicap of deafness, the most conspicuous 
member of the advertising profession in 
America. 

When I was a boy I knew an old woman, a 
physician, who came to the point where she con¬ 
fronted a dreadful death at not more than a 
year’s remove. But, as I later learned that she 
had confided to my mother, she believed that she 
could keep going until within six weeks or there¬ 
abouts of the end; and she made up her mind to 
do so, because she proposed to make her life 
count for good, against even the limitation of 
that darkest of menaces, to the last possible mo¬ 
ment. I was in her office for some minor malady 
the day before she took to her bed; her manner 
had not changed, she had made no concession to 
the harassing encroachments of disease. I used 
to visit her while she was dying; I have seen her 
in moments when under some excruciating visi¬ 
tation of pain there was a look as of a tortured 
wild animal in her eyes. But those moments 
were the brief and unacknowledged interrup¬ 
tions of the continued exercise of her gift for 
sound and illuminating counsel, lighted up by 
an unfailing wit and a strenuous benevolence. 


SLAVE OR FREE? 


141 


When that woman left this world, it is safe to 
say that it was with an increase of moral stature, 
wrested by her free will from the advancing 
shadow of the grave in the last year of her life, 
greater than many of us achieve in a whole life¬ 
time. 

When one considers such instances as these, 
one feels utterly ashamed of that mood of dis¬ 
couragement which we all have at times experi¬ 
enced, and which signifies a useless and sinful 
surrender to be the slaves of circumstance when 
we might be, under God, the masters of our 
fate. 

Determinists old and new, theological or 
scientific, to the contrary notwithstanding, we 
are not slaves; we are free. Our moral choices 
are our own acts, and their quality depends upon 
our initiative. Multitudes there are upon whom 
the world might pass, in the brief instant before 
they fade from memory, this judgment which 
is our text, as a sort of collective epitaph: “They 
have chosen their own ways,” degrading the di¬ 
vine potentialities of their being by following 
paths of ease and self-indulgence which lead to 
destruction. But it rests with us, if we will, to 
exercise our choice in such a way that we shall 
never in the future have reason to lament our 
decision, with shame and confusion—to choose 
the ways of God, the paths of righteousness, that 


142 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


we may find true happiness in serving Him and 
mankind, and in working with Him to achieve 
our own reward in immortal personalities ever 
growing in the comprehension and enjoyment of 
spiritual reality. 


XII 


WHAT IS SIN? 

Wash you, make you clean; . . . cease to do evil, learn 
to do well; . . . though your sins be as scarlet, they shall 
be as white as snow. Isaiah 1 : 16 , 17 , 18 . 

In approaching the discussion of sin, its sub¬ 
jective consequences, their implication, and the 
way out, we shall do well to preface by drawing 
a distinction between sin and crime. Crime is 
the transgression of law; sin is the transgression 
of conscience. Ideally this should be a distinc¬ 
tion without a difference; for the aim of juris¬ 
prudence is to enact and administer only such 
laws as are consonant with conscience. But the 
demands of conscience change with times and 
occasions; no absolute right is revealed in hu¬ 
man experience, and the best approximations 
we can make to the final standard in differing 
circumstances will not always be harmonious 
with one another. Some things which are right 
for us were wrong for our fathers; some things 
obviously wrong in the twentieth century were 
right enough under the simpler conditions of 
earlier days. Legislation responds slowly, 

143 


144 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


however, to changes in the requirements of con¬ 
science; so that one may actually be doing right 
by refusing obedience to a law outgrown, as 
when the early Christians refused to render di¬ 
vine homage to the Roman emperors. So our 
concern in this discussion is with conscience, not 
with law. 

But if the verdict of conscience is variable, 
what deep and constant significance can con¬ 
science have? Just this, that, whatever its 
command may be in a given instance, it is a judg¬ 
ment which we are instinctively moved to render 
in terms of right and wrong. These terms are 
of an order distinct from those other antitheses, 
as true and false, beautiful and ugly, pleasant 
and unpleasant, which constitute the categories 
of reason. To illustrate: not every action en¬ 
joined by conscience is agreeable, or the reverse; 
he who supposes that goodness consists in always 
doing what one does not want to do is as mis¬ 
taken as though he supposed that goodness 
consisted in alw r ays doing what one does want 
to do. We may some time arrive at an ultimate 
code of mundane morality; but, whether we do 
so or not, that our minds are so constituted as to 
think in terms of right and wrong—of a judg¬ 
ment directed upon character, upon the essence 
rather than the accidents of being—is the first 
and greatest evidence that we are not beings of 


WHAT IS SIN? 


145 


the earth only, animals of a subtler growth, but 
also deeply related to a spiritual order tran¬ 
scending time and space. 

Though we are thus instinctively inclined to 
judge in terms of right and wrong, nevertheless 
one of the perils of that hardening process to 
which the years expose our minds is that we 
shall not develop this intuition, or that, after it 
has been developed, it will yet be atrophied by 
neglect. The first requirement for building 
personality worthy of our opportunities for 
growth in this world is that our conscience, our 
moral judgment, be strengthened by exercise, 
so that the relation with the higher order of life 
which it betokens may be preserved and 
strengthened. To this end training in obedi¬ 
ence, to precepts of the home and of society in 
general, serves for children and the mentally im¬ 
mature; as St. Paul said, “The law was our 
schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ”—that is, 
to that free envisagement and pursuit of the 
moral ideal which constitutes the life of Christ 
in the soul of man. For those who have 
reached that degree of maturity at which a 
hiatus becomes occasionally manifest between 
law and conscience, the agency best adapted for 
the stimulation of the moral judgment is organ¬ 
ized religion. The first function of the Church, 
in relation to the issues of human conduct, is 


146 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


not to lay down laws, but to keep people aware 
of the importance of the distinction between 
right and wrong—to stir up sluggish consciences, 
to start the negligent and keep the attentive 
thinking about duty rather than about advan¬ 
tage, and thus to inspire the faithful to live by 
the light of their own consciences, neither en¬ 
slaved to the dictates of others, nor benighted in 
the darkness of their own passions undiscrimi- 
natingly indulged. 

Sin being, then, a man’s transgression of his 
own conscience, let us analyze the sense of guilt 
which is the witness to sin in one’s heart, that 
we may find out what sin means and how we can 
escape from it. First, we should never feel 
guilty if we did not believe that our wrongdoing 
had been voluntary. Free will is the presuppo¬ 
sition of every verdict of conscience. Free will 
is denied in two ways. First, by the guilty, to 
dodge the discomfort and blame attendant upon 
their misdeeds. We all like to say, by way of 
excuse, “I just couldn’t help it.” When we say 
it, however, we know very well, in the depths of 
our hearts, that what we mean is, “I didn’t want 
to help it!” Second, by philosophers who can¬ 
not find a logical place for it in their scheme of 
the universe. That is a real difficulty, akin to 
the enigma presented to the naturalist by the 
phenomena of living matter. The naturalist can 


WHAT IS SIN? 


147 


resolve a physical organism into its constituent 
elements—all except life itself, which he can 
find with no microscope or scalpel. But leave 
life out, and the organism will resolve itself into 
its constituent elements, instead of continuing to 
function as it did before. We have yet to hear, 
however, of a naturalist who says there is no life, 
because he cannot fit life into his scheme of the 
elements. So why should it disturb us that free 
will is similarly elusive of our logic? There it 
is; though we cannot account for it, yet we can¬ 
not maintain self-consciousness without admit¬ 
ting it, in practice if not in theory. And in this 
presupposition of the moral judgment, that our 
wills are our own and our conduct is as we freely 
make it, I find another telling testimony to 
man’s kinship with the eternal. 

An element of the sense of guilt which is so 
prominent that its importance and value have 
been much exaggerated is fear of the conse¬ 
quences of wrong actions. This is an ignoble 
sentiment, of which every self-respecting man 
ought to be ashamed. If, in the exercise of our 
freedom, we are going to do wrong, then let us 
at least take the consequences like men, instead 
of shuddering and shrinking at thought of what 
may befall us. It were better to endure torment 
manfully rather than to undergo the qualms and 
bear the stigma of cowardice in outward ease. 


148 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


It is astonishing that the dread of hell should 
have been pressed home upon men’s timorous 
souls, as it often has been, by teachers of reli¬ 
gion, as a motive for coming back to God. What 
sort of Christians can they be whose principal 
motive for following Christ is to save their own 
skins? I do not find in the records that Jesus 
tried to frighten people into the Kingdom of 
Heaven; probably because frightened people 
would be of as little use in the Kingdom as they 
are anywhere else. Moreover, fear of conse¬ 
quences is not peculiarly associated with sin; it 
may now and then be felt, quite as reasonably, in 
connection with obedience to conscience, as in 
the instance already adduced, of the refusal of 
the early Christians to render deific honors to 
Csesar. Fear of the consequences in that case 
would have been a motive for refusing to do 
right, and doubtless was such a motive with 
many; but the many who saved their skins by 
compromising their souls have sunk long since 
into ignominious oblivion, while the martyrs who 
were true men, with the courage of their con¬ 
victions, will be remembered gratefully forever. 
Being true men, they would doubtless, if they 
had chosen to do wrong, have had the courage of 
their sins, and even so would have been wor¬ 
thier of respect than the people whose motive 
for righteousness is self-preservation. Bet- 


WHAT IS SIN? 


149 


ter a splendid rogue than pusillanimous saint. 

But the sense of guilt is by no means identical 
with mere fear of consequences. There remain 
two other elements in it, of far greater weight 
upon every soul not sunk in cowardice. The 
first of these is a sense of disappointment and 
self-disgust because we have been unworthy of 
ourselves. This feeling comes to us even when 
there are no outward consequences of any sort 
to dread. We hate ourselves, and wish we could 
get away from ourselves, and do all that we can 
to forget ourselves, when our consciences tell us 
that we have been untrue to the very fiber and 
essence of our being by committing sins known, 
it may be, to ourselves alone. Now that is an 
extremely depressing feeling; yet, when we look 
at its implications, it seems to me that it affords 
ground for pride and hope. For we should not 
feel that sin is infidelity to our real selves, if we 
had not an awareness, as innate as the assurance 
of our freedom, that we are not mere dust—ani¬ 
mated clods crawling for a day over our mother 
earth and falling then with other worms into 
dreamless sleep—but creatures of air and 
flame, born of the lightning of God, and de¬ 
signed to move with Him forever in the high 
places of His empyrean. I am glad to have been 
at times terribly ashamed of myself, before the 
bar of my own conscience; for that shame is 


150 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


rooted in a deep consciousness that my real self 
is of God, so that to refuse obedience to con¬ 
science, the voice of God, is to lose touch with 
my own soul. 

The second of these more significant ele¬ 
ments in the sense of guilt is a feeling of grief 
and horror, as though we had inflicted horror 
and grief upon the spirit of the universe, and 
they were reflected back from the universal 
Spirit upon our own. I do not think that by any 
rationalization this conviction that sin has 
brought discord instead of harmony with some 
personal force beyond ourselves and this earth 
can be explained away. It goes through the 
consciousness of every tribe and type of man of 
which we have any record; it is not, I believe, the 
result of religious teaching, but the ground of 
that outreach after the spiritual which results in 
religion; it has found pathetic expression in the 
propitiatory sacrifices of all faiths, from the al¬ 
tars of cruel idols to the cross of Christ; and it 
seems to me to point unmistakably, out of the 
depths of racial consciousness, toward infinite 
Personality, toward God, with whom it behooves 
us to maintain filial harmony, but from whom 
by sin we do what we can to cut ourselves off. 
I am glad that when we sin there is this distress, 
deeper than our disappointment with ourselves, 
deeper far than any fear of consequences, which 


WHAT IS SIN? 


151 


bespeaks a slight and wound inflicted on the 
Infinite Being whose we are; for I am well as¬ 
sured that it is He who makes us feel that we 
have wounded Him, so that in this consciousness 
we have an intimate witness to His nature, like 
our own, and to His concern for our lives. 

To him whose moral judgment is so keen that 
to transgress conscience brings with poignancy 
these twin afflictions, self-detestation and the 
sorrowing sense of discord with the universe, it 
must seem, in the hour of guilt’s realization, that 
the only hope of the soul is to get back out of 
the shadow of shame into the sunlight of honor 
and harmony again. But how is so great a mat¬ 
ter to be transacted? The word of the Lord 
through the prophecy of Isaiah, fairly represent¬ 
ative of many such utterances through many 
other scribes in Holy Writ, tells us to do it for 
ourselves: “Wash you, make you clean.” But 
this is a divine invitation; and for us to take the 
initiative upon the divine invitation is for us to 
be assured of divine cooperation toward the end 
which we seek. The greatest compliment God 
could pay His children on the earth is to make 
them responsible for their own emergence out of 
the slough of sin, at least in so far as that they 
must first seek His aid before He will vouchsafe 
it to them. For that means that He regards 
mankind as of like being with Himself, upon 


152 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


whom therefore even the boon of pardon and 
peace is not to be thrust unsolicited, but by whom 
it is to be achieved through the consent and free 
motion of their own wills. Even when we are 
farthest down and seem most helpless, there is 
something we can do, there is something indeed 
that we must do, for none other can do it for 
us. We can turn our hearts from filth to pu¬ 
rity, our eyes from the gutter to God, and thus 
take the first step toward our own restoration. 

And how shall we thus cleanse ourselves, so 
that our sins shall be white as snow? Since the 
profoundest element in our sense of guilt is the 
sorrowing conviction of estrangement from God, 
upon what conditions will He consent to our 
reconciliation? The view, probably born of ac¬ 
quaintance with earthly autocrats, has widely 
prevailed, that we must repay God, for the in¬ 
juries done His righteousness by sin, in sacrifice 
of something with equivalent value. And this 
old notion of sacrifice has been carried over into 
the Christian faith, so that a common w r ay of 
representing the atoning ministry of our Lord 
is to say that on the cross he bore our sins as a 
substitute, a victim in our behalf of the wrath of 
God, or of His outraged justice. Now I am 
grateful for that concept, because of the reas¬ 
surance it carries to primitive minds adrift from 
God, so that they may have courage to anchor 


WHAT IS SIN? 


153 


themselves again in His loving-kindness. But I 
strongly incline to believe that this expiatory no¬ 
tion can be applied to our Lord only as a figure 
of speech, accommodating truth to limited un¬ 
derstanding. For by no means can we hold that 
God is actually a being of such a disposition that 
He must be appeased before He can regard us 
with favor; since Jesus has taught us that God 
is no hostile tyrant, but our Father and Friend. 
So I must believe that the passion of our Lord 
changed, not God’s attitude toward men, but— 
by its vivid persuasions—men’s attitude toward 
God; and that, as this passage from the writings 
of a Prophet who long antedated Jesus would 
indicate, the sole condition prerequisite to re¬ 
stored harmony with God after our sin is that 
we turn to Him in confidence of His love, con¬ 
fessing our transgressions, and seeking to be re¬ 
stored to the favor of His grace. 

There is no substitute that I know of for gen¬ 
uine penitence, expressed in prayer to God, to 
lift men out of sin and its oppressions into joy 
and light again. The need for penitence has 
been, I fear, little stressed in our liberal churches 
of late years; for we have been so concerned with 
new theologies that we have neglected old proc¬ 
esses, cogent and essential under every theol¬ 
ogy, for the well-being of the soul. It is a simple 
fact of experience, however one may account for 


154 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


it, that a heart burdened with guilt does find 
surcease from its woes by turning with faith to 
God, who does in some way make known to His 
sincerely repentant children that He loves them, 
and is no longer wounded by their sins, and will 
be with them and sustain them as they go for¬ 
ward in a new and better way. 

As by repentance and the prayer of faith we 
find the way out of the grief of our guilt, so by 
drafting and embracing new purposes, in the 
light of conscience once more heeded, do we set 
out upon the way which leads us up out of self¬ 
disgust into courage, zest and hope restored, and 
through them to worthy attainment. It is of in¬ 
terest at this point to note that sin is represented 
in our text, as by our own retrospective repul¬ 
sion, as defilement. Dirt is matter out of place, 
and sin is action out of place. It consists either 
in the indulgence of legitimate impulses in 
wrong ways, or in the pursuit of happiness, a 
legitimate goal, along faulty and inadequate 
lines. So, having found peace with God, we find 
cleanliness of living again by a sort of spiritual 
housecleaning, whereby we bring the elements of 
our experience back into due relations one with 
another instead of scattering them in promiscu¬ 
ous confusion, with consequent discomfort and 
distress. When a man, having turned back from 
error and sin, makes choice, under the guidance 


WHAT IS SIN? 


155 


of conscience, of a right purpose to dominate his 
life, that purpose becomes the organizing prin¬ 
ciple of his personal economy, so that impulses 
are kept in their due places, order succeeds chaos, 
and moral progress thus becomes possible. And 
when progress has begun, through purposeful 
living, even though its starting-point be the gut¬ 
ter, then self-disgust is no longer in place, but 
is superseded by an increasing and joyous con¬ 
fidence that we shall yet apprehend that to 
which our deepest nature summons us. 

Sin is the transgression of conscience, which 
may or may not coincide with the transgression 
of law. Conscience bespeaks the spiritual qual¬ 
ity of our being. The sense of right and wrong, 
upon which it rests, must be educated through 
training in obedience until mental maturity is 
attained, and stimulated thereafter by the moral 
urgency of religious teaching. The sense of 
guilt presupposes our freedom; and involves, be¬ 
side an ignoble fear of consequences, a sense of 
disappointment predicated upon our conscious¬ 
ness of divine potentialities which we have 
stultified, and of grief predicated upon our con¬ 
viction of the existence of a personal God whom 
by our sins we have wounded. To escape from 
sin and guilt, we ourselves must take the initia¬ 
tive ; but, as we do so upon divine invitation, God 
Himself will help us up and out. He will do this 


156 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


by forgiving us freely when we turn to Him in 
penitence, and by reinvigorating our wills when 
we choose consistent service of deliberate and 
noble purpose in preference to careless indul¬ 
gence of impulse and appetite. 

Our well-being depends primarily not upon 
our material fortunes, but upon serenity within, 
upon being at peace with God and with our¬ 
selves. If, therefore, there are those among us 
who are restless and unhappy, let them search 
their hearts to see whether perchance the cause 
of their distress be not their own moral failure— 
some sin, it may be, not yet acknowledged even 
to themselves. In that event, let them face that 
sin candidly, carry it to God, and follow His way 
out of failure toward restored moral health. We 
must not forget these vital considerations in any 
absorption in practical tasks—even of the 
Church, which would better fail, than prosper at 
the expense of that higher life which is religion’s 
first concern. For only as the Church ministers 
to our immortal souls has it any claim upon our 
support. Above all, then, let us cultivate the 
moral judgment, and, walking by its light, fulfil 
our mission as a Church by persuading our fel¬ 
low-men to do likewise. 


XIII 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness 
to be tempted of the devil. — St. Matthew 4:1 

The question has often been raised whether 
Jesus, the sinless man, was actually tempted. 
There are three reasons for believing that he w r as. 
First, the Gospels say so. Second, unless he 
was actually tempted, he was spared the very 
crux of the moral struggle of mankind, and con¬ 
sequently cannot be adjudged truly, or at least 
not fully, a man. Third, Jesus has bequeathed 
to his Church a memento of the poignancy of 
his own experience at this point in that pathetic 
clause of his model prayer, “Lead us not into 
temptation”—about which it is fair to say that 
it reflects an appealingly human desire to escape 
from trial, rather than a deliberate judgment 
that God ever sends temptation, or, on the other 
hand, that temptation is an unmitigated ill. 

The reason why we are inclined to question 
the reality of our Lord’s temptation is that the 
actions to which our temptations prompt us are 
so shameful that we are inclined to be ashamed 

157 


158 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


of the temptations themselves, as though they 
could not occur to a truly virtuous soul. But in 
this opinion I believe not only that we are mis¬ 
taken, but also that it invites confusion in our 
thinking and disaster to our moral efforts to re¬ 
gard temptations as in themselves sinful. For 
we grapple with them successfully, not by try¬ 
ing to deny that they exist in order to save our 
self-respect, but by confronting them in a candid 
and matter-of-fact way, and overcoming them 
face to face. To find out the implications of this 
observation, which we all know experience con¬ 
firms, let us consider whence temptation comes 
and what it is. 

Of course, from the standpoint that tempta¬ 
tion itself is sinful, an explanation of our Lord’s 
trial in the wilderness exempting him from any 
inner response to the solicitations of evil, thus 
regarded as already in a certain measure imply¬ 
ing complicity therein, is to the effect that, as 
our text narrates, he was tempted of the devil— 
this statement being interpreted as of an imperti¬ 
nent and utterly unwelcome approach by an 
external agent. But who is the devil? We are 
entitled to be doubtful as to the actual existence 
of any disembodied spiritual agent of evil, in 
view of the fact that of such an agent we have 
no conclusive evidence in our own experience. 
This doubt is supported by the further fact that 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


159 


the theory of a kingdom of maleficent spirits 
was imported into Hebrew theology from Per¬ 
sian sources, without any essential connection 
with the distinctive principles of Hebrew faith. 
There are such clear advantages of picturesque 
and vivid reference in speaking of evil as though 
it were personal, and outside of human nature, 
that we shall doubtless always continue to use 
the name of the devil as a convenient personifica¬ 
tion of the dangerous and destructive impulses 
of our being; but it is worthy of note that, when 
St. Paul, the first philosopher of the Christian 
faith, though he also employed this personifica¬ 
tion at times, came to rationalize its meaning, he 
was obliged, so to speak, to psychologize, and 
consequently declared, “The mind of the flesh 
is enmity against God.” We cannot do better 
than to follow this apostolic precedent, and, for 
practical purposes at least, identify evil, in its 
approach to undermine our moral integrity, with 
the impulses of the carnal mind, that is, of our 
animal nature. 

The temptations which come to us are of 
many sorts and orders. Some of them are re¬ 
mote from their springs in our instinctive life; 
some of these remote temptations do indeed par¬ 
take in some measure of the nature of sin, since 
they would hardly come if we had not invited 
them by dwelling perversely in thought upon 


160 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


the supposititious delights of wrong-doing. 
Nevertheless, I have never heard of a tempta¬ 
tion which could not be directly or indirectly 
traced back to some urge of our physical organ¬ 
ism, or some combination of such urges. But 
there are no urges of our physical organism 
which, in the proper time and place, it is not 
right to indulge. To mention a very simple in¬ 
stance, all decent people abhor a glutton; but 
gluttony springs from the appetite for food, 
which must be regularly gratified in moderation 
if we are to survive. It is because our tempta¬ 
tions arise from these innocent causes that I dare 
to assert that they are not in themselves shame¬ 
ful. A legitimate desire becomes a temptation 
when it rises in consciousness to deniand grati¬ 
fication in an illegitimate way or an unappropri¬ 
ate situation. The desire is not in itself wrong; 
but it is wrong to yield to it when it conflicts 
with acknowledged prior obligations. 

The human organism is an entity composed of 
many subordinate elements which have a being 
of their own relatively independent of the whole. 
Our bodies are built up of living cells into living 
organs, each with its peculiar function, and con¬ 
sequently making a special demand upon the 
whole assemblage of these diverse parts, in 
which each plays its distinctive role. As the 
solar system is a society of stars, and the nation 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


161 


is a society of men, so the body is a society of 
organs. In every society, each of its elements 
asserts itself, by the law of its own being, above 
the other elements, and must be held in due re¬ 
lation to the rest by a social control. The con¬ 
trol in the solar system is the power of the sun; 
in the nation, it is the government; in the indi¬ 
vidual, it is the purposeful will. When this 
control breaks down, anarchy results. When, on 
the other hand, this individual self-assertion of 
the parts ceases, atrophy, or mortification, or 
paralysis of the whole ensues. Within our own 
nature, in other words, we are confronted with 
that task of effecting a counterpoise between in¬ 
dividual and general interest which is found 
everywhere else in our experience. In conse¬ 
quence, so far from temptation being in itself 
sinful, that man is lacking in such vigor of his 
component organs as is vital to his own virility 
who is exempt from temptation. But, to realize 
that potential strength of his whole being to 
which the strength of his very temptations bears 
witness, a man must learn to be master in his 
own house, holding his impulses down in proper 
relation to one another instead of indulging them 
at the expense of his corporate well-being. 

The practice of this self-control, which in¬ 
volves the overmastering of importunate im¬ 
pulses for the sake of their harmonious interplay, 


162 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


can only be achieved by holding firmly to a 
rational aim based upon one’s relations, beyond 
his own person, with the rest of the universe. 
The aim of this order most generally held has 
in view only the advantage of the individual, dur¬ 
ing the period of his natural life. It forbids in¬ 
dulgence of any appetite at the expense of 
physical health, or of social repute, or of funda¬ 
mental financial security. This is the utilitarian 
type of morality, to which every man not alto¬ 
gether a fool renders at least the tribute of lip- 
service. Another name for this ethic is the 
shrewder selfishness—for it subordinates selfish 
impulses of the coarser and more immediate sort 
to considerations of selfish advantages in the 
long run. This is the ethic which the world is 
agreed to regard as reasonable morality. It is 
worthy of note, in passing, that even this utili¬ 
tarian morality, applied with rigorous logic, 
would, in our time at least, of an extremely com¬ 
plex civilization with closely interlocking factors, 
forbid violence among individuals and warfare 
among nations. 

But he who thinks at all about the setting of 
human life soon discovers that we are environed 
not only by our associations and interests close 
at hand, but also by all time and all space, the 
whole infinite concatenation of causes and effects 
which constitutes the universe. You and I live 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


163 


in a city; our city is in a state; our state is in 
the United States; the United States is in the 
western hemisphere; the western hemisphere 
is on the earth; the earth belongs to the solar sys¬ 
tem; the solar system—what is its environment, 
thus ultimately ours, but the whole starry 
heaven? We live in the twentieth century; the 
twentieth century is one of a limited series de- 
marked upon a succession of thousands, perhaps 
of millions of centuries, already passed in the 
history of our planet. Our planet is a young 
sprout in the wide celestial gardens of eternity. 
How long our planet will endure into the in¬ 
scrutable future no man knows or can estimate; 
how long the skies will endure after our planet 
is burned or frozen into death, no man can 
dream. What, then, is our time but a glinting 
ripple in the measureless flow of incalculable 
years? In this perspective of unbounded space 
and endless time, our true environment, we feel, 
though we cannot prove, that there is meaning. 
That is the beginning of faith; for meaning im¬ 
plies intention, and intention is a personal at¬ 
tribute, wherefore our sense of a significance 
infusing all things inevitably involves a convic¬ 
tion that a supreme Personality indwells the 
whole. But if this inconceivably larger environ¬ 
ment of ours have meaning, such as our immedi¬ 
ate environment derives from the purposes of 


164 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


collective humanity, then to this larger environ¬ 
ment also we must adjust ourselves purpose¬ 
fully, overmastering our mere physical impulses 
to direct them in harmony with the universal 
aim. What this universal aim may be in the 
large we cannot define; but of its kind we Chris¬ 
tians believe that we are fulfilling a primary 
human intuition in declaring that it corresponds 
with the character of our Master, the finite 
mirror of the infinite—his character, of such 
goodness as by its quality dwarfs into utter in¬ 
significance all considerations of mere selfishness, 
as does the universal aim by its magnitude. So 
to master one’s impulses as to bring one’s con¬ 
duct into line with this higher reason, based upon 
the faith that the totality of being has meaning 
like the character of Jesus, constitutes the mor¬ 
ality which appertains to religion, in contrast 
with mere utilitarianism. Putting it succinctly, 
one may state the principle of this religious ethic 
in some such words as these: we are to do only 
such things as are consonant with our true and 
ultimate nature as children of God, destined to 
dwell with Him through all eternity. 

A temptation, then, is any urge to action 
which does not accord in a given situation with 
our divine estate. How shall we decide among 
our impulses, and reduce them to their proper 
place, especially when they happen to conflict? 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


165 


Let us investigate this question by examining an 
imaginary case in which two impulses are pres¬ 
ent, both of which cannot be indulged, and 
neither of which can be indulged with propriety. 
Let us suppose that a small man of choleric dis¬ 
position is attacked, or otherwise provoked to 
physical encounter, by “a mighty man of valor” 
—in Old Testament phrase—larger than he. 

He is likely to be confused by the simultane¬ 
ous emergence of two instincts: one, that of 
pugnacity, to give as good as he got; the other, 
that of self-preservation, to run away. Obvi¬ 
ously he cannot do both. If he does either, 
calamity is likely to follow. For, if he fights 
back, he will probably be soundly punished; and, 
if he runs away, he will incur self-contempt and 
invite the jeers of all observers. If he can gain 
a moment to think, perhaps he will decide some¬ 
how between these two impulses; put away the 
one which he has determined to deny, after ac¬ 
knowledging and honestly estimating it; act 
upon the other, and take the consequences. The 
external consequences will in that event no 
doubt be unfortunate; but at least he will suffer 
no internal complications, for he has (by hy¬ 
pothesis) gauged both impulses candidly before 
dismissing one of them. 

But now suppose that the impulse he refuses 
to gratify is one which he feels shame even to 


166 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


experience. Then he is likely to shove it out of 
sight, so to speak, with his face averted—not 
even acknowledging to himself that such an im¬ 
pulse has been present in his mind. That course 
—to which we are invited by the fallacious no¬ 
tion that temptation in itself is sinful—consti¬ 
tutes what is called “repression,” and becomes 
the kernel of a subjective complex, a sore spot 
deep down in the mind, which may work all sorts 
of havoc; for which one is entirely unable to ac¬ 
count for the reason that one succeeds in actually 
forgetting, so far as the conscious mind is con¬ 
cerned, an impulse thus repulsed with horror. 
If our choleric little man repressed his instinct 
to belligerency I am not sure just what would 
happen to him; something unpleasant certainly: 
perhaps an inclination to attribute violent mo¬ 
tives (such as the one he had repressed) to 
everybody in every situation. If, on the other 
hand, he repressed his instinct to run away, he 
would almost certainly become in some degree a 
victim of what during the war we called “shell 
shock”—which was nothing more nor less than 
a bad case of blue funk, indignantly crowded 
down into the unconscious by its victim, and vin¬ 
dictively working itself out in derangements of 
his organic functions. Shell shock was by no 
means a new thing in the Great War, despite 
the novelty of the term, and of the explanation 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


167 


of this phenomenon which modern psychology 
has afforded us. It is at least as old as the Bat¬ 
tle of Marathon; for Herodotus tells of an 
Athenian warrior in that bloody fray who, 
though he fought doughtily, lost his sight per¬ 
manently on that day without having received a 
single blow from the enemy. The man’s own 
account of how this came about—offered with 
innocent frankness, because he had successfully 
refused to own to himself that he had been 
afraid—was that his vision departed at the mo¬ 
ment when he saw the man next to him in line 
felled by a huge Persian of horrific aspect. 

But if our choleric little man were honest 
enough with himself to acknowledge in his own 
soul without shame that two impulses were pres¬ 
ent in his mind at the moment—to fight back 
and to run away—and were unwilling to act 
upon either of them, the only other course open 
to him would be to spar for time and attempt 
conciliation. If his motive in doing this were 
just to escape wounds and ignominy—that is, 
the utilitarian ethic—he might persuade his 
would-be antagonist to regard him indulgently 
and patronizingly, somewhat to his own humilia¬ 
tion; or, failing in his attempt at conciliation, he 
would wish for the rest of his life that he had 
either run away or fought back. If, however, 
he chose this course from a sincere conviction 


168 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


that any other would be wrong, since he and his 
adversary alike were children of God, obligated 
to preserve and extend divine good will irre¬ 
spective of their personal interests, then he 
would either win his would-be antagonist to a 
new comprehension of the dignity of moral 
principle in human conduct; or, if the antagonist 
proved recalcitrant, he would himself have, to 
console him while he recovered from his injuries, 
the conviction that he had suffered as a martyr 
for conscience, and had preserved his self-re¬ 
spect and the favor of God by heeding, though 
under severe penalty, the requirements of 
righteousness. 

Not only was Jesus really tempted; but every 
man must be tempted, who has impulses strong 
enough to enable him to serve the right effec¬ 
tively so long as they are held in control by an 
aim adequate to his status as a child of God. 
There is no shame or sin in being tempted; for 
a temptation is simply an untimely urge to ac¬ 
tion which would be legitimate and honorable 
upon its own proper occasion. If, however, we 
master our impulses just for the sake of our 
own selfish advantage, that achievement of 
merely utilitarian morality will betoken no more 
than the raising of the carnal mind to a higher 
level, serving the devil in subtler and mightier 
form. As men of faith, we are to master our 


WHAT IS TEMPTATION? 


169 


impulses from the standpoint of our relation with 
the infinite meaningful universe—the spirit of 
God—a relation the conviction of which consti¬ 
tutes the ultimate ground of the moral conscious¬ 
ness, and of religion, 


XIV 


HUNGER 

And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he 
afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto 
him. If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones 
become bread. But he answered and said. It is written, 
Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 

—St. Matthew 4 : 2 - 4 / 


That at the beginning of his ministry Jesus 
had to pass through a period of severe moral 
trial it is reasonable to suppose. But the ac¬ 
count of his threefold trial in the Gospels pre¬ 
sents puzzling features to our understanding. 
While in general the allegorizing of biblical 
statements is a process fraught with peril to 
sound interpretation, yet in such a passage as 
this we are in effect obliged to adopt an allegori¬ 
cal explanation, for the reason that, whatever 
the objective truth may have been, it is strictly 
incomprehensible, from the standpoint of our 
own experience, save as its terms are regarded 
as a stenographic symbolical report of the typi¬ 
cal temptations which our Lord had to over¬ 
come. So, in discussing the first of these 

170 


HUNGER 


171 


testings of his moral strength, we must take the 
tempter to be a personification of evil; Jesus’ 
hunger to stand for physical appetite in general; 
and the power which he is supposed to have 
had, or to have supposed that he had, of turning 
stones into bread, as designating that spiritual 
power, capable of and intended for direction 
upon eternal ends, which is the distinctive at¬ 
tribute of human nature as derived from the 
nature of God. The temptation here repre¬ 
sented is, then, to degrade man’s spiritual capac¬ 
ities for the service of his physical appetites as 
their main objective. 

It is important to grasp this meaning clearly. 
For otherwise we are likely to suppose that the 
satisfaction of hunger is itself here viewed as 
illegitimate. And of course that is absurd. If 
bread had been available in the regular way, 
Jesus would doubtless have partaken of it cheer¬ 
fully at the expiration of his long fast. To sup¬ 
pose that any physical appetite is of itself, and 
in due subordination to the higher aims of life, 
evil, and to be withstood and thwarted, is to de¬ 
part from the sane teachings of the Gospel into 
dangerous extremes of contempt and hatred for 
the body. That many Christians have taken this 
extreme position is no justification for the posi¬ 
tion itself; rather, their error is to be regretted, 
as misrepresenting the Gospel, which inculcates 


172 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


no hostility to the valid interests of a full and 
well-rounded life in this world, but rather invites 
to normal living at its most complete, with rea¬ 
sonable provision for all the aspects of man’s 
being. It is the raising of the body to usurped 
ascendency over the spirit, rather than the satis¬ 
faction of bodily needs in proper relation to 
spiritual concerns, which is here in question. 

Before proceeding to the discussion of this 
theme, there are two prefatory remarks which 
I deem it advisable to make: First, the subject 
is obviously a delicate one. It is susceptible of 
harsh and coarse treatment. Perhaps some 
Christian teachers would seek unenviable pub¬ 
licity by disregarding the canons of good taste 
upon this subject. I ask you, however, to be¬ 
lieve and note that I am endeavoring to treat it 
with correct reserve, leaving it to you to make 
many applications and elaborations which it 
would be of questionable propriety for me to 
indicate. 

Second, I shall have to speak of certain trends 
which are conspicuous in our time. But please 
do not imagine that I am speaking in the vein 
of a Jeremiad, or a splenetic diatribe, as though 
our time were worse than other periods of his¬ 
tory. Indeed, I hold that on the whole it is 
better. But, since the elemental impulses of 
humanity do not change with the improvement 


HUNGER 


173 


of social usages designed to regulate their dis¬ 
play, the same wrongs are to be observed in 
general conduct today as in earlier periods. 
Perhaps they are more clearly to be seen now 
than at some times in the past, for the reason 
that we are much more frank than were our 
Puritan fathers. This frankness, however, is 
by no means wholly to be condemned. I doubt 
whether there is more evil now than formerly; 
but I am confident that there is much less hy¬ 
pocrisy, and that, other things being equal, is 
a point gained. 

Now we all know, from painful and torment¬ 
ing experience, how powerful are the urges of 
our physical organism; how hard they are to 
master when they demand, as often they do, 
without consideration for our ulterior interests, 
immediate obedience to their passionate impera¬ 
tive. And likewise we all know that many yield 
this obedience, to their own grave disadvantage 
in many ways. Our purpose now is to fortify 
our own resolution against the debasement of 
spiritual energies to physical ends, by noting 
what irreparable damage to the integrity of our 
being is wrought by thoughtless indulgence of 
the lower self. 

I shall have only a word to say about the de¬ 
sires of the flesh at their lowest level and in their 
crudest form. I have always believed that, while 


174 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


withstanding vice vigorously in our own lives, 
we ought to be content to take for granted with¬ 
out curious exploration those lugubrious and de¬ 
plorable spheres of living, the “underworld,” in 
which men and women seem content to be vicious 
and bestial. We have to take so much of the 
good side of life for granted, that we may well 
compensate ourselves for this necessity by taking 
all we can of its evil side for granted also. We 
all know that in city streets and country lanes 
alike are to be found the wanton, the drunken 
and the drugged. Some of us have been obliged 
to observe at first hand the awful consequences 
of vicious living; most of us, I presume, have had 
to contemplate this tragic abyss in our own hy¬ 
pothetical future, as we trembled and sought to 
maintain our balance on its brink. The thing to 
note is that the wild horses of passion, given free 
rein, precipitate those whom they drag after 
them into dark destruction of all that gives per¬ 
sonality intrinsic worth; while these same wild 
horses, harnessed to a stubborn will for right¬ 
eousness, become tremendous instruments of 
good. Let no man make excuse for his crimes, 
that his passions are strong; for no man ever 
achieved genuine virtue whose passions were not 
strong, but held in firm control. 

Carnal appetites also assert themselves, how¬ 
ever, in ways less noxious and disgusting than 


HUNGER 


175 


vice, but not less criminally inimical to the im¬ 
mortal nature of man. I am thinking now of the 
seductions of soft and easy living, the pleasures 
of the table and the armchair. Many a man who 
would scorn to pursue such a course as would 
land him in the gutter is rendered as void of 
spirituality as a vegetable and brought to an 
early grave by the eminently respectable and 
genial sins of overeating and padded inertia. I 
never see a man whose skeleton is deep-seated— 
to employ a euphemism I have recently acquired 
for the description of the excessively plump— 
without being skeptical about his soul; though 
sometimes, to be sure, his corpulence is patho¬ 
logical, and my skepticism is unwarranted. For¬ 
tunately, of late, two beneficent fads have been 
making their way to general acceptance, which 
a man enamored of the Greek ideal of perfect 
physical condition must hail with rejoicing: diet 
and exercise. 

Diet and exercise, however, while they make 
for grace, vigor and longevity, are by no means 
guarantees of spiritual-mindedness. For carnal 
desires may also be, and frequently are, indulged 
in more refined and insidious ways, less detri¬ 
mental in their physical consequences, but quite 
as subversive of the soul’s welfare as vice, glut¬ 
tony and sloth. 

Three of these ways for titillating the nerves. 


176 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


soiling the mind and stimulating unwholesome 
fancies are especially conspicuous among 
thoughtless people nowadays. First, a brazen 
immodesty, which has to some extent won con¬ 
ventional endorsement. Whether they like the 
responsibility or not, the women have in their 
custody the moral standards of the race. Two 
indications that they take this responsibility with 
unseemly lightness are afforded by the extrava¬ 
gant reduction of women’s costume in recent 
years, and their flaunting of cosmetics. I am 
aware that the present styles for women are 
hygienically an improvement upon the street¬ 
sweeping sartorial devices which were in vogue 
twenty-five years ago, and that the discreet use 
of artificial color is unobjectionable save to an 
exaggerated prudery. Nor would it be just or 
sensible to bring any indictment of indiscretion 
or questionable motives against women who 
follow the current modes with judgment and 
moderation. But we have all observed how un¬ 
precedentedly frequent even among women 
otherwise thoroughly respectable are the ex¬ 
tremes of these trends, the motive for which can 
only be the indulgence of a silly carnal vanity, 
seeking the morbid scrutiny and disrespectful ad¬ 
miration of casual observers. 

Another form of immodesty which it pains 
people who want to be broad-minded to admit 


HUNGER 


177 


is that which obtains in much recent dancing. I 
have never been able to hold with severe and 
censorious critics that dancing of itself is wrong. 
It seems to me to be natural, innocent and beau¬ 
tiful, and to afford training in physical grace 
which all should covet. But obviously that can¬ 
not truthfully be said of certain forms of danc¬ 
ing which are now to be observed in almost every 
ballroom, and which it would be beneath one’s 
dignity to comment upon further. 

Now immodesty is a form of social daring 
which is inspired by the carnal mind, and 
involves such a degradation of the spiritual 
energies of those who indulge in it as to be de¬ 
structive of the essential reserves of a dignified 
self-respect, and of that sense of the ultimate 
sanctity of human personality which underlies 
virtue in all its forms. 

Another of these subtly seductive tendencies 
to carnal indulgence is the love of sensation 
which is dragging down the tone of the press 
and of fiction. Newspaper editors claim that 
they cannot control the moral quality of their 
columns: for profits depend upon advertising; 
advertising is based upon circulation; circulation 
is built upon giving people what they want; and 
what people want nowadays is stories of crime 
and divorce, with as few as possible of the grue¬ 
some or erotic details omitted. The result is 


178 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


that the important news of the day is hardly 
worth pursuing into the corners to which it has 
been relegated, and that many of the sober- 
minded and upright confine their perusal of the 
newspapers to glancing at the headlines, and 
read of current events only in weekly or monthly 
periodicals, which maintain a certain minimum, 
at least, of decency. Paralleling this poisoning 
of the press is that type of realism, falsely so- 
called, which stocks our news-stands with lurid 
and shocking periodicals crammed with nauseous 
sex-stuff, and our bookstalls with literary junk 
of like character which it is an insult to letters 
to dignify with a binding. Where is the can¬ 
didly lewd paper-back novel of yesteryear? It 
now wears the disguise of a two-dollar “best 
seller.” And here we behold that spiritual en- 
ergy which goes in quest of truth, eternal and 
glorious, damned and deflected into channels of 
prurience, pandering to an ignoble craving for 
vicarious vice. 

The third of these tendencies is the insatiable 
appetite of the masses—including the “classes,” 
I fear—for amusement, entertainment, what is 
ludicrously misnamed “a good time.” From 
watching the ebb and flow of human tides in our 
streets, the exits and entrances of many homes 
supposedly of high ideals and cultivated stand¬ 
ards, one is almost forced to conclude that most 


HUNGER 


179 


souls are now running a temperature, diseased 
with a fever for gaiety. Always to be going 
somewhere, talking with some one, seeing some 
new thing—what is this but a pursuit of the im¬ 
mediate satisfaction of the moment, basically 
akin to carnal sins of the most revolting order? 
And where do we go, and what do we hear and 
see? We go to garish restaurants, to eat in time 
to the blaring cadences of barbaric jazz, and 
thence to movies, to see empty-faced screen fa¬ 
vorites moping, mowing and posturing in mock 
heroics, in sumptuously depicted plots and situ¬ 
ations which to an intelligent high school student 
would be commonplace, vapid and unconvincing, 
but which are usually redeemed in the eyes of 
varnished vulgarity by the circumstance, hardly 
inadvertent, that they are distinctly risque. This 
is art, the appreciation of beauty, as the multi¬ 
tudes cherish it in our time! 

In all these matters we have to do with a de¬ 
grading of spiritual energies from their spiritual 
ends to carnal objectives, more or less direct. 
To withstand the temptation which these trends 
convey, as Jesus withstood the tempter, we need, 
first, a renewed appreciation of our spiritual 
energies themselves. That we are able to think, 
to reflect, to decide between right and wrong, to 
rejoice in beauty, and to love our kind and our 
heavenly Father with sacrificial devotion, if we 


180 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


will—these capacities bring us in touch with an 
eternal world, qualify us to grow into new and 
higher states of being, and are the evidence in 
us of a divine quality which destines us to im¬ 
mortality. When once we apprehend the fact 
and all it implies, how scornful we must become 
of behavior merely animal, of pursuit of merely 
and immediately passing satisfactions! 

Second, we need a fresh appraisal of the body. 
The body with its instincts is designed to be our 
instrument of self-expression upon our present 
plane of being. As a servant it is the most in¬ 
tricate, competent, and admirable device within 
our ken, worthy of the creative designing of a 
beneficent and omnipotent Artificer who has 
brought it to its present approximate perfection 
through countless ages of evolutionary advance. 
As a master, however, the body is as out of due 
relations as would be a machine in control of a 
man. A man in a runaway motor car knows 
that destruction lies ahead. A man who lets his 
body run away with him may be equally sure of 
the same thing. So we must bring the body into 
subjection. We must keep it in its place. We 
must use it instead of being used by it. 

That is the reason why ascetic practices, delib¬ 
erate curbings of lawful desires for mastery’s 
sake, have value. Ascetic renunciation as an end 
in itself involves the absurd notion that hunger, 


HUNGER 


181 


thirst, and other like physical frustrations, are 
states of grace. Jesus never accepted or en¬ 
dorsed that depressing vagary of the diseased 
religious imagination, but, as he himself said, 
“came eating and drinking.” But the word 
“asceticism” comes from a Greek original which 
means physical exercise or discipline, and is com¬ 
monly used in connection with athletics: it is the 
discipline of the playing-field and the training- 
table, making the body the servant of the will, 
with stern control of its insurgent appetites in 
appropriate season, yet with perfect attention to 
its authentic needs, as an engineer supplies fuel, 
oil, and intervals of inactivity to the motor under 
his control. Asceticism in that sense we need 
to practice, enchaining impulse and imagination 
and making them the slaves of our pursuit of 
eternal values—the true, the beautiful, and the 
good, which inhere and are subsumed in God, 
fellowship with whom is the highest good and 
the true end of man. 

If we will have the courage to stand out 
against every importunate inclination rooted 
however remotely in bodily appetite, and to focus 
our spiritual powers upon this spiritual end, we 
shall, beginning with little acts of self-denial 
and mounting with our accruing strength to com¬ 
plete control of all untimely passions, enjoy a 
sense of victory, of spiritual resilience, of capac- 


182 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ity and of anticipation which will prepare us for 
achievement of our destiny and calling as God’s 
children, as our Lord achieved his destiny and 
fulfilled the call of God upon the indispensable 
preliminary condition of mastering his passions 
and harnessing them to the valid aims of his 
radiant and triumphant spiritual manhood. 


XV 


SELF-SEEKING 

Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set 
him on the pinnacle of the temple and saith unto him, If 
thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down; for it is written, 
He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and, 
On their hands they shall hear thee up, 

Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. 

Jesus said unto him, Again it is written. Thou shalt not 
make trial of the Lord thy God. 

—St. Matthew 4:5-7 

Our Lord’s first temptation was to self- 
indulgence. He had next to outface the impulse 
to self-glorification. To cast himself down from 
the pinnacle of the temple into the most crowded 
area of Jerusalem before the astonished eyes of 
throngs of spectators would have inaugurated 
his ministry with a sensational act which must 
inevitably have given its tone of conceited self¬ 
exhibition to all his subsequent contacts with the 
public. That his transportation by the devil to 
this surprising eminence was a flight of his im¬ 
agination we may assume. That Jesus could 
actually have precipitated himself from such an 
eminence to the ground without injury we can¬ 
not help doubting. Nevertheless, the meaning 

183 


184 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


of this report of the second temptation as a sym¬ 
bolical account of a typical incitation to base 
conduct is clear. 

Self-seeking is a more subtle but not less dan¬ 
gerous type of selfishness than self-indulgence. 
And the spring of all self-seeking is the impulse 
to assert one’s own personality and make it con¬ 
spicuous; in one way or another, to “show off.” 
Well is this impulse called vanity; for vanity 
means emptiness or hollowness, a fitting syno¬ 
nym for folly. The difference between a wise 
man and a fool is that, whereas every man has to 
contend with the temptation to vain display, the 
wise man contends manfully and overcomes, 
while the fool lets the battle go by default and in¬ 
dulges this impulse, at the expense of his judg¬ 
ment, his sense of humor, and his modesty. 

The psychological ground of vanity is the in¬ 
evitable fact, inherent in self-consciousness, that 
each man seems to himself to be the center of the 
world. If a mosquito had a soul, he would sup¬ 
pose that the skies turned about his sting; 
whereas, in truth, he would be, as every one of 
us is, only the center of his own world, a sub¬ 
jective distortion of reality. There are two ways 
of correcting this perverse self-centered view¬ 
point. One is to find oneself obliged, by the 
competing pretensions of the more powerful, to 
give way, sullenly, before their more successful 


SELF-SEEKING 


185 


self-assertion, and to make provisional allowance 
—under coercion, as it were, and with protest— 
for the superiority of others’ interests to one’s 
own. The other and better way is through faith 
in God, in whom by definition the whole universe 
has its being, so that every finite self is recog¬ 
nized as only one among innumerable other finite 
selves, graded in a hierarchy ordered and gov¬ 
erned by the Supreme Being, the authentic Cen¬ 
tral Self, whose viewpoint alone is therefore 
ultimately valid, and the standard by which each 
man must gauge his conduct and interests in¬ 
stead of by his own transient personal prejudice. 

Illustrations of self-glorification are always 
before us, but are especially conspicuous in those 
callings which are transacted largely in the public 
eye. Every athletic coach knows how fatal it is 
to successful team action to have a star per¬ 
former on a team who is given to grandstand 
plays. Likewise, there are actors who will have 
no artists of ability comparable with their own 
in their companies, and who do not hesitate to 
degrade great drama as a mere vehicle for their 
own mannerisms and egotistical affectations, to 
be played out under the spotlight. There are 
preachers who recruit crowds of the curious by 
sensational topics, sensationally discussed, and 
who use the sacred rostrum of the Church, not 
for its designed purpose as a source of saving 


186 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


indoctrination in divine truth, but as a setting 
for the exploitation of their own personalities, to 
win the plaudits of the thoughtless. Of such a 
preacher I once heard it caustically said, “His 
discourse was thin, but it was evident that he 
wanted us to admire the way he wore his hair.” 
And there are politicians who, in place of cham¬ 
pioning straightforwardly, and at whatever risk 
to their own careers, the political views in which 
they profoundly believe, use the issues they es¬ 
pouse, instead, as means to their own promi¬ 
nence, and advancement; never espouse an issue, 
indeed, save with their tongues in their cheeks; 
and thus are content to be mere demagogues. 

But the same inclination is quite as dominant, 
though less conspicuously so, in many whose 
work is done privately. The gravest menace to 
human progress is the prostitution of energies 
which should minister to the general welfare to 
the aggrandizement of the individuals who ex¬ 
ercise them and who through them seek not to 
serve, but either to win admiration by self-dis- 
play or to make themselves feared for their 
power. 

To seek admiration is unwise, even from the 
standpoint of enlightened self-interest. For, if 
one fail to achieve it, one’s bid for it becomes 
ridiculous and invites derision. And, if one gain 
it, unwilling applause will always be tinctured 


SELF-SEEKING 


187 


with envy. But envy is a social poison, detri¬ 
mental to all in the group in which it exists, in¬ 
cluding the person admired. Moreover, it incites 
those who feel it to harsh and hostile criticism 
behind the back of him before whose face only 
praise is uttered. 

Again, to make oneself powerful in order to 
be feared is to enjoy, indeed, while the power 
lasts, a flattering sense of importance, a glow of 
rather mean-spirited self-confidence. But the 
man who makes himself feared by others than 
the enemies of righteousness—who invites the 
truckling subservience of underlings by using 
success and influence to back up a stern and over¬ 
bearing manner—sows seeds of venomous hatred 
in the hearts of all whom he oppresses. So he 
is likely to incur downfall when their antagonism 
finds, at some moment of relaxed vigilance or 
diminished reserves on his part, a favorable op¬ 
portunity for throwing off the yoke they have 
unwillingly borne. 

Thus to utilize life’s opportunities for self- 
glorification is indeed a vain and treacherous 
course. On higher moral ground, it is open to 
the further objection that it betokens the lack of 
a decent respect for the business itself, whatever 
it may be, which is thus misdirected, and for its 
legitimate function as one element in the inter¬ 
play of the creative forces of human destiny. 


188 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


It is a dreadful thing to limit one’s own useful¬ 
ness, the purpose for which God has put one in 
the world, by putting oneself forward instead of 
forwarding one’s work. There is, moreover, no 
real happiness to be found in work done with 
an ulterior motive. The only way to enjoy the 
daily routine is to transact it for its own sake, 
because it is worth doing, and with the feeling 
that it is more important and its results will be 
more lasting than one’s narrow and selfish aims. 

Our Lord decided this question for himself 
once for all at the outset of his ministry. He 
was called upon, however, to reaffirm that de¬ 
cision many times; for repeatedly his critics, and 
some half-convinced friends, demanded of him a 
“sign”—that is, some sensational deed to compel 
their credence—in ratification of his supernal 
claims. No sign, however, would he give them. 
He did indeed heal the sick and raise the dead; 
but, when he did so, it was not that men might 
know that he was the Messiah, but that sick peo¬ 
ple might be well, and bereaved people might 
find comfort. He chose to give himself to the 
principle in which he believed instead of using 
that principle for his own temporal profit. So 
he became in the sight of men, as he was in 
nature, the very incarnation of the principle of 
divine redemptive love; and, while fated by the 
opposition of dull and wicked men to a seeming 


SELF-SEEKING 


189 


defeat in his own generation, he has achieved, 
through this identification of his personality with 
a cause greater than any personality, the name 
of the greatest hero of the race, and has demon¬ 
strated a moral quality which authorizes us with 
every support in reason to acclaim him as the 
eternal Son of God. 

His decision at this point ought to govern our 
decisions in like matters. Our personalities are, 
so far as this earth is concerned, of only passing 
moment at best. Whatever fame we win, what¬ 
ever power we exercise, by vain self-assertion, 
must be presently relinquished, and will surely 
and shortly thereafter be forgotten. But our 
personalities may achieve real distinction by vol¬ 
untary subordination to transpersonal ends—by 
becoming the vehicles of ennobling selfless serv¬ 
ice to human welfare and for the glory of God. 
That is the principle, then, which we ought to 
choose as governing and motivating all our par¬ 
ticipation in the world’s business. 

If we do thus deliberately choose to subordi¬ 
nate self to the principle of service, instead of 
exploiting our opportunities for service for the 
gratification of our futile and insensate vanity, 
we shall find ready access for the high values 
which we promote to many hearts which would 
be closed against our self-seeking; and we shall 
achieve an intrinsic dignity among our fellow- 


190 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


men—needing no buttresses of pretension and 
display, because it connotes an immortal quality 
of our nature—not the bubble reputation, but the 
substance of character, which we shall carry on 
with us to other spheres after we leave this world 
behind. 

The center of the world does not lie in any 
one of us. So long as we suppose that it does, 
we shall be mere creatures of time and space, 
curious, ephemeral biological phenomena, neither 
worth remembering nor capable of accomplish¬ 
ing ends worth conserving. But the center of 
the world lies in God. If we will but remember 
that, and correct the egocentric view to which 
self-consciousness invites us by this act of faith 
in Him whose interests alone run with His laws 
supreme throughout the universe, we shall fulfill 
our business on the earth with lasting credit to 
ourselves and gain to His cause, and shall be rec¬ 
ognized and remembered as positive psychic fac¬ 
tors in the progress of humankind toward the 
Kingdom of God. 


XVI 


NO COMPROMISE 

Again, the devil taketh him unto an exceeding high moun¬ 
tain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and 
the glory of them; and he said unto him. All these things 
will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. 
Then saith Jesus unto him. Get thee hence, Satan: for it is 
written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only 
shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him; and behold, 
angels came and ministered unto him. 

—St. Matthew 4:8-11 

Let us again remind ourselves that it is not 
necessary, in order to learn the lessons of this 
narrative of the temptations of our Lord at the 
beginning of his ministry, to accept it as a literal 
transcript of fact. It is legitimate, and indeed 
from the standpoint of our experience necessary, 
to interpret this narrative allegorically. It is 
quite possible that these temptations, in the form 
they here assume, came to Jesus at this period as 
dreams; for the figures and events which occur 
in them have a decided semblance of dream sym¬ 
bolism. This third and last temptation repre¬ 
sents the question, arising in the Master’s mind, 
as it arises sooner or later in all other minds, 
Does the end justify the means? And his ver- 

191 


192 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


diet upon this point in casuistry is an emphatic 
“No,” which may well guide us to a like deci¬ 
sion when we likewise are tempted to compromise 
our principles for the sake of achieving some 
right and reasonable aim which we entertain. 

This temptation must indeed have been a 
strong one. For it offered to our Lord the very 
thing he sought; namely, world-mastery. Jesus 
came into the world in order to achieve dominion 
over all the kingdoms thereof. It is a mistake to 
suppose that there was anything diffident or 
shrinking about his attitude toward the empires 
of the earth. On the contrary, he was a man of 
towering ambition, who would and could be sat¬ 
isfied with nothing short of supremacy. It was 
to win this supremacy that God had sent him 
here. The final goal of Providence in history is 
not democracy, but the Kingdom of Christ: an 
autocracy of righteousness resting upon the will¬ 
ing obedience of all God’s subjects, toward which 
democracy is only an advanced step. 

Jesus was confronted, in this dream, with full 
satisfaction of his ambition, provided he would 
accept it on condition of a purely private trans¬ 
action, a merely formal and momentary obei¬ 
sance to the power of evil. No one need ever 
know that this act of reverence had taken place. 
This element of secrecy must have played no 
small part in the force of the temptation. For 


NO COMPROMISE 


193 


it is an instinctive view of us all that guilt and 
public shame are, if not synonymous, at least 
correlative. It is hard for us to realize, and it 
was probably just as hard for Jesus, on first 
thought, that sin is sin, compromise is compro¬ 
mise, whether any one save the responsible agent 
know about it or not. But Jesus, like all prudent 
men, was in the habit of postponing action until 
he had thought twice. And on second thought, 
of course, he saw through this notion that wrong 
is innocuous so long as it remains hidden. 

By doing homage to the devil, Jesus was as¬ 
sured that he might achieve at once the world- 
dominion which he sought. So he would have 
saved a great deal of time. It may easily have 
appeared to him at first that the world would 
have immensely benefited if his reign as the 
divine vicegerent of our planet were to com¬ 
mence without delay, instead of being brought 
about only through thousands of years of dark 
struggle and suffering. This consideration, too, 
must have made much of the weight of the temp¬ 
tation. We all have a liking for short-cuts to 
success, whether the success we have in mind be 
selfish or, as in Jesus’ case, magnanimous. But 
there are short-cuts legitimate and illegitimate. 
To illustrate, in solving a difficult mathematical 
problem there are two ways of finding out the 
answer with a minimum of effort. The first is 


194 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


to use upon the problem the briefest mathemati¬ 
cal formula applicable to it, previously proved 
and understood by the reckoner; that is legiti¬ 
mate. The second way is by looking up the 
answer in the back of the book; that is illegiti¬ 
mate. Time saved in the wrong way ultimately 
proves to be a loss rather than a gain. Surely a 
Kingdom of God set up by grace of the devil, 
however swiftly, would not have been so good for 
the world, even during the ages saved by this 
device, as a Kingdom of God slowly but surely 
established over human hearts by the persuasions 
of divine love. 

We may be confident that our Lord was fully 
aware of the perils involved in clandestine ar¬ 
rangements, and of the evil of achieving his ends 
by means which gainsaid and defeated it in ad¬ 
vance. But there were two other reasons which 
must have taken prime rank among his motives 
for rejecting this solicitation of evil. First, the 
devil promised him all the kingdoms of the world, 
and the glory thereof; but the devil would not 
keep his promise. He would not if he could; for,* 
as Jesus said, “He is a liar, and the father of it.” 
He could not if he would; for, though it is a 
favorite maxim of moral pessimism that the 
devil is the prince of this world—that is, that 
evil motives dominate human actions—yet that 
maxim is a fallacy. The man who deliberately 


NO COMPROMISE 


195 


wills evil is a grotesque exception to the rule of 
human nature. It is stupidity, not malignity, 
which is the root of most of the ills that flesh is 
heir to. And so, in every instance, hopes 
grounded upon the fair promises of guile prove 
finally deceptive. Sooner or later he who builds 
his career upon the shrewd subtleties of dishonest 
design will fall back down the ladder of intrigue 
by which he has climbed—on the analogy of 
Jesus’ stern dictum, “They that take the sword 
shall perish by the sword.” 

Second, if our Lord had consented to accept 
world-dominion on the devil’s terms, and the 
devil had kept his promise, it would not have 
been our Lord who entered into this wide do¬ 
main. That is to say, he would have been a 
changed Jesus, no longer the incarnation of God, 
but a fallen angel whose light was turned to 
darkness. For he would have lost his self-re¬ 
spect. Even if nobody else knew of his bargain 
with Satan, he would have known; and that 
knowledge would have proved his undoing. As 
of any good man it can be said, “His strength 
was as the strength of ten, because his heart was 
pure,” so of any man who has voluntarily low¬ 
ered his standard it can be said with equal jus¬ 
tice that his strength is turned to weakness 
because his conscience is wounded. Without self- 
respect, Jesus could not have won the love of 


196 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 

his subjects; without the love of his subjects, 
Jesus would have had to become a Csesar instead 
of a Christ, to maintain his authority, and the 
world would have been worse rather than better 
for his presence in it. 

Was there in the actual experience of Jesus 
anything to bear out this dream of rapid success 
through compromise with evil? I have always 
believed that this temptation met him repeatedly 
in extremely practical ways. For Jesus had the 
gift of magnetism, which drew crowds to him, 
without very clear reference to the tenor of his 
teachings, while, at the same time, we find that 
he was socially acceptable to the privileged. It 
therefore requires no great strain of the imagi¬ 
nation to suppose that, had he been willing to 
modify his utterances at some inconspicuous 
points, to make them more acceptable to the 
privileged classes among his people, and had he 
sought, for selfish advantage, the favor of the 
chief priests, he might with relatively little diffi¬ 
culty have exploited his genius to become the 
recognized hero and champion of Jewish national 
politics. Had a man of Jesus’ temperament and 
intellectual capacity gained such a status, it is 
not easy to set limits to his possible power and 
influence over world affairs. For we must re¬ 
member that in the opening decades of the first 
century the Augustan regime was still new, and 


NO COMPROMISE 


197 


consequently without traditional support, at 
Rome—with about the degree of political secur¬ 
ity which appertained to the Second Empire 
while it was in power in France. A successful 
Palestinian uprising, directed by a tribune of the 
people who could universalize the tenets of the 
faith of Israel in terms attractive and not too 
exigent for a world tired of paganism and with 
an eager appetite for exotic religious novelties, 
might conceivably have overturned the estab¬ 
lished order, and placed its leader upon the 
throne of the Caesars, as the French Revolution 
was to place a Corsican adventurer upon the 
throne of Charlemagne. And a man like Jesus 
—for we must remember that his was an extraor¬ 
dinarily acute mind—may well have compre¬ 
hended this remote yet putatively realizable 
possibility when, as again and again occurred, 
he was solicited to identify his cause with the 
nationalist aspirations of the Jews. But to these 
solicitations, as to the devil’s approach in the 
weird dream of the wilderness, he replied with a 
resolute and unhesitating refusal to compromise 
the truth that was in him. 

Instead of following the broad highway of 
double-dealing down into the fertile and smiling 
valley of worldly splendor and authority, Jesus 
chose, with his eyes open to all that the choice 
portended, to mount the hilly footpath that led 


198 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


to Calvary. So his earthly life was blotted out 
in that darkness of ignominy which overshad¬ 
owed the cruel cross. But on that cross he set 
forth more effectively than in any words the love 
—the yearning, impassioned, sacrificial solicitude 
for the relief and deliverance of his fellow-men 
—which was the only principle by which he 
could, consistently with his own convictions and 
his knowledge of his divine mission, set about to 
win for himself, and to administer, that dominion 
of the world which he sought. And the greatest 
miracle of history is that the centuries have re¬ 
versed the negative verdict of his own time upon 
Jesus’ career, so that, by virtue of this very abne¬ 
gation of self-seeking for the sake of unsullied 
loyalty to his heavenly Father, he has ever since 
been coming into his own; nineteen ceuturies 
after his death, millions upon millions of earth’s 
denizens acclaim and adore him as their earthly 
King and their eternal Savior, and, observing 
the signs of his expanding and penetrating sway 
over the motives and institutions of humanity, 
believe themselves justified in saying: “The 
night of earth’s rebellion is far spent; the day of 
Christ’s Kingdom is at hand.” 

All through life you and I have to confront a 
temptation, like this which came to our Lord, to 
gain the ends we seek by means of which we must 
be ashamed. It confronts us first in our school 


NO COMPROMISE 


199 


days. How shall we win good grades, and the 
successive diplomas which are passports to en¬ 
larging spheres of usefulness and influence? 
Why not “bluff” and cajole our teachers, and 
“crib,” instead of doing honest work to master 
the subjects which our teachers profess? Thou¬ 
sands there are who do so; and sometimes they 
“get by” much better, for the moment, than those 
who pursue their studies with unbending recti¬ 
tude. But what do they gain? Grades and di¬ 
plomas. What do they miss? The knowledge 
which these awards are supposed to attest. They 
cheat themselves of that vigorous and effective 
mental training which the schools are designed 
to afford, and which they need for grappling 
with the difficulties of life. And they acquire, 
too frequently, a habit of sliding along on the 
surface of things, guiding their course by mere 
puerile tricks, which stays with them through 
the years, and makes them not partners but 
annoying clutterers and hindrances in the world’s 
business, despised by all sensible people, who see 
through them. 

Again, we are tempted to make friends by low¬ 
ering our moral standards to the level of the 
carelessness of many whose good will we seek to 
purchase, and by flattering them—by telling 
them what they want to hear instead of the truth. 
But even those whom we try thus to conciliate 


200 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


will be wary of us if we do this, for they can 
hardly fail to note that we do not ring true. 
And, even if they did fail to note it, they could 
not be our friends, for the reason that we could 
not be their friends: friendship, in the true sense 
of the term, as contrasted with mere amiable 
superficial acquaintance, is grounded in recipro¬ 
cal sincerity, and he who compromises sincerity 
forswears friendship. 

Further, we may be tempted to achieve busi¬ 
ness success by any underhanded means avail¬ 
able, provided only that we stay just far enough 
within the law to keep out of jail. The realm of 
commerce and finance affords countless oppor¬ 
tunities for profitable sleight-of-hand. But these 
are mean opportunities, for they arise incident¬ 
ally to the fact that business is based upon credit; 
that is, upon pre-supposition of good faith on 
the part of all participants. When one consid¬ 
ers the vital role in human welfare played by 
industry in our time, one cannot doubt but that 
to seek success in business is legitimate, and com¬ 
patible with the highest moral aspirations. But 
to buy success at the cost of self-corruption, is 
to incur the hatred and contempt of one’s vic¬ 
tims, and to plant in one’s own heart seeds of 
apprehension and self-distrust which spring up 
like weeds to stifle every sturdy growth of peace 
and joy, so that a man who ceases to be honor- 


NO COMPROMISE 


201 


able in order to become rich loses the very flavor 
of his riches. Many a poor man dines more 
happily upon a crust than do some rich men 
upon a banquet. 

By contrast with the ease of attainment to 
which a facile treachery to conscience often min¬ 
isters, the gait by which clean and honest people 
go forward toward their goal seems dreadfully 
slow. Probably every one of us has had occa¬ 
sion at some time to sense this contrast keenly 
and mutinously. But the patience which this 
slower route requires is compensated by the fact 
that, while we follow it, we remain our true 
selves, instead of changing for the worse; and, 
when the goal is reached, we have won it in such 
a way as to be likely to hold it, and to be able to 
enjoy it without remorse or shame. 

But suppose a man seeking his goal by right 
means fail to achieve it, while his neighbor, con¬ 
tent to employ any means available, wins through 
to pompous place and pride? That often hap¬ 
pens; and it would be a just occasion for bitter¬ 
ness, if it were the goal that counted. But no 
goal in this world counts for itself in the sight 
of God, or of right-minded men. What counts 
is that we should be going forward toward some 
goal, of such a sort as to be the earthly symbol 
of an ideal. So long as we are pursuing an 
ideal, we are growing character; and that is what 


202 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


our life here is for. So soon as the ideal aspect 
of our goal is clouded or eclipsed, so that it loses 
its symbolic value and becomes merely an earthly 
gain to be pursued for its own sake, the growth 
of character ceases, and its deterioration begins. 
And that, and that alone, is failure, grim and 
terrible beyond offset or diminution of its scan¬ 
dal and sting by any fleeting show of worldly 
gain. 

It is a fine and stirring example which our 
Lord has given us in preferring failure with 
honor to tainted success. God, who strengthened 
him to withstand this ordeal and keep his con¬ 
science clear, will stand by us likewise, if we too 
will determine, with far-sighted courage, to make 
no compromise ever, but to play the game accord¬ 
ing to the rules, to seek our ends by means no 
man can impugn, and to be content to wait upon 
God’s time of fulfillment for our hopes, even 
though the way be long and the discipline be 
tedious by which we approach the coronation of 
our labors. 


XVII 


NON-RESISTANCE 


Thinkest thou that I cannot beseech my Father, and he 
will even now send me more than twelve legions of angels? 

—St. Matthew 26:53 


Suppose Jesus was right. Suppose he could 
have summoned more legions of angels than he 
had had disciples before Judas’ defection. Why 
did he not do so? Why did he submit to the 
cross, instead of whelming his enemies in ruin 
with the hosts of the Lord God of Battles? 

But suppose he was wrong. Suppose there 
are no angels, and miracles never happen. Were 
these words the pathetic bravado of a man in a 
corner? Was Jesus whistling to keep up his 
courage? But he was in this corner by his own 
choice. Whether or not he could have summoned 
angels to his rescue, the fact is beyond question 
that he need never have required rescue if he had 
chosen to evade this issue of his ministry. He 
might have kept in hiding until the storm blew 
over, instead of deliberately blowing up the 
storm. He might, even upon his trial, have 
hedged and recanted, and escaped. He might, 

203 


204 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


throughout his ministry have sought to ingra¬ 
tiate himself with the powers that were, instead 
of speaking out his whole mind whether they 
liked it or not. Why, then, did he suffer himself 
to be overtaken by the ignominious shadow of 
criminal execution, instead of living on to round 
out his career through the normal allotment of 
years? 

It was not for lack of foresight. For he saw 
his approaching end long before it reached him, 
yet fared valiantly forward to meet it. It was 
not because he was tired of life, so as to welcome 
an opportunity for suicide by legal process. For 
no man ever shrank with more palpable sincerity 
from the ordeal of capital punishment than did 
our Lord. It must be, then, that his acceptance 
of the cross was related vitally to his purpose in 
living. He must have felt that that purpose 
would not be served by evasion or resistance, 
whereas it would be served by submission to the 
worst that the wrath of his enraged opponents 
could compass. 

What was Jesus’ purpose in living? Not to 
gain power or renown for his own selfish satis¬ 
faction, but to gain currency for a supremely 
important truth of which he held himself to be 
the spokesman. He was the Truth-Teller of the 
ages, a messenger of good tidings to all the 
world. To be sure, the temptation to seek selfish 


NON-RESISTANCE 


205 


aggrandizement was always with him. He faced 
it in the wilderness just after his baptism, and 
again when he entered Jerusalem on the Sunday 
before his death. But, whenever he confronted 
this temptation, he overcame it. And those 
means only he employed which would promote 
acceptance of the truth he had to set forth. 

Christian theology is an attempt, changing 
with the changing concepts of men’s minds 
through the centuries, to state and elucidate 
this truth of which Jesus was the bearer and 
the incarnation. Theology is a complex disci¬ 
pline with many ramifications. But the key to it 
all is to be found in a perfectly simple assertion, 
which was the theme of all the sermons Jesus 
ever preached, and which he expressed in the first 
phrase of the model prayer: “Our Father, who 
art in heaven.” 

If I were to paraphrase that key-text, I should 
put it in these terms: “The Spirit of the uni¬ 
verse is conscious and competent good will.” 
Now perhaps you will not like that paraphrase, 
because it sounds more academic than religious. 
But that is why I like it. For we are wont to 
give an emotional turn to religious utterance 
which seems to remove religious truth from the 
sphere of entire and practical reality. We are 
rather disposed to think of a religious truth as a 
proposition which we wish were accurate—and in 


206 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


which we will wistfully pretend to believe—but 
which, after all, can hardly stand the rough tests 
of the workaday world. But it was not at all in 
this way that Jesus thought of his central con¬ 
viction, the Fatherhood of God. For a truth 
only half true neither he nor any other man 
would willingly die. Instead, to him the funda¬ 
mental verity of life in its spiritual aspect was 
as plain, as practical, as self-evidencing as any 
axiom of Euclidian geometry—for instance, that 
a straight line is the shortest distance between 
two points. 

Now if Jesus’ purpose was to gain currency 
for a practical truth of incalculable moment to 
all mankind, he could only achieve that purpose 
by teaching; that is, by stating the truth in such 
a way as to win attention, so that people would 
think about it until they saw it, and therefore 
understood it. The learning process is one of 
recognition; the teaching process is one of arous¬ 
ing interest in the matter to be recognized. That 
is why Jesus elected to preach, and did not like 
to perform wonders. The idly curious might 
suppose that wonders were his credentials; but 
he knew that the truth he proclaimed was its own 
credential, if only he could get people to think 
about it until they visualized it and found it 
irresistible, as we visualize the axiom about a 
straight line and, having once done so, can never 


NON-RESISTANCE 


207 


call it into question while we are in our right 
minds. 

But there is this difference between a geomet¬ 
ric axiom and Jesus’ key-truth, that geometry 
makes no difference in our way of living, while 
religion turns us about. Truths potent enough 
to turn people about often come up against the 
obstruction of closed minds, minds closed by in¬ 
dolence of brain and atrophy of the imagination, 
and shuttered and barricaded by jealous self- 
interest. That, of course, is what happened in 
Jesus’ case. Now what shall we do to win en¬ 
trance for truth into closed minds? Shall we 
punish and subdue the bodies through which they 
function? That is all the angels could have done 
to the Jews and Romans, if Jesus had summoned 
them. The Jewish hierarchy and the Roman 
military state were alike imperiled by the simple 
but revolutionary truth which Jesus was pro¬ 
claiming. Temple sacrifices and imperial levies 
would alike be voided of all significance if once 
good will were recognized as the law of the uni¬ 
verse. But to attempt by physical force to over¬ 
come their stubborn antagonism would only 
arouse resentment, which closes the mind more 
tightly than ever; it is interest alone which 
prompts a man to open his mind voluntarily 
from within, and the doors of the mind cannot be 
broken in from without. If a man is a coward, 


208 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


you can force him to say that he believes what 
you tell him; but in his heart he will disbelieve 
more vehemently than ever, under this coercion 
of his body. Swords are the argument of fools, 
who understand neither the nature of truth nor 
the way in which it must be imparted. 

But, in the absence of the angels, the Jews 
and the Romans were far more powerful physi¬ 
cally than Jesus, who had to stand out against 
them alone, deserted even by the feeble and fu¬ 
tile band of his faint-hearted disciples. So they 
decided to put an end to the Gospel once for all 
by making an end of Jesus. And they nailed 
him to a cross; and he let them. For he knew 
that, though they broke his body, they could not 
touch his message. Truth is not of time or space; 
it cannot be locally isolated, and made to expire 
by shedding its blood upon a cross. Truth is 
eternal, and so beyond the reach of fools who 
seek to assail it, and by so doing merely placard 
their folly in the derisive view of mankind. So 
to evade or resist the cross could not have helped, 
to accept the cross could not hinder, the purpose 
of Jesus’ living. 

But to accept the cross could and did marvel¬ 
ously help that purpose. For in teaching the 
first point is to win attention. And who wins 
more attention than he who is vilely wronged? 
It is safe to say that no one who had been of that 


NON-RESISTANCE 


209 


surging, hissing, blood-greedy crowd at Calvary 
ever afterward stopped thinking about the man 
on the central cross. Nor can the world ever 
stop thinking about him, and being interested in 
his message because of his fate. To persecute 
any doctrine is to advertise it. For, though the 
docile vulgar may accept what they are told, that 
the persecution is just, yet all critical and rebel¬ 
lious minds, the saving remnant of society, will 
react with antagonism toward the persecutors 
and sympathy for the persecuted, thus opening 
their minds eagerly to the doctrine violently im¬ 
pugned. It has been said that the blood of the 
martyrs is the seed of the Church; this is the rea¬ 
son. It may quite as well be said that the perse¬ 
cution of radicals is the seed of radicalism. The 
most persuasive publicity socialism has ever re¬ 
ceived in the United States was the imprison¬ 
ment of Eugene V. Debs. Nor does this hold 
true of radicalism only. The triumph of the 
principle of so-called “legitimacy” at the Con¬ 
gress of Vienna in 1815, marking the defeat of 
the French Revolution, was a direct consequence 
of the appeal to the popular imagination in be¬ 
half of royal prerogatives which the Revolution 
made when it slew Louis XVI, the poor drunken 
incompetent, and Marie Antoinette, a dull and 
frivolous woman of light character, transfigured 
in the social memory into saints and martyrs 


210 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


by pity for the penalty exacted for their follies. 

Especially does this principle of recommenda¬ 
tion by persecution hold if there be those at hand 
after the fatal event who are prepared to explain 
its significance to the intrigued masses in terms 
favorable to the victim. Of course, that was the 
case with Jesus’ death. He had trained and com¬ 
missioned the Apostles to propound his key- 
truth and its corollaries; and he knew that they 
would also set forth his own character and story 
with tongues aflame with love and adora¬ 
tion, when once his troubles and their perplexi¬ 
ties in his company were over, and the benign 
immediacy of his radiant personality had be¬ 
come for them a gracious and heroic recollec¬ 
tion. 

So Jesus went to the cross willingly, because 
he cared more for truth than for earthly life, 
and because he knew that the interest necessarily 
antecedent to the recognition of new truth would 
be aroused, as in no other way it could be, by his 
undeserved shame and agony, and would be ex¬ 
ploited in behalf of his saving Gospel by his 
followers. And ever since the cross has been, and 
so it will remain until the end of time, a beacon 
lifted high in popular imagination, for all men 
to view, to interrogate, and to learn therefrom 
its purport, as the culminating evidence of his 
sincerity who proclaimed the emancipating truth 


NON-RESISTANCE 


211 


that the Spirit of the universe is conscious and 
competent good will. 

This utter loyalty to truth at any cost, which 
was in the soul of Jesus, has kindled a like loy¬ 
alty in many souls since his time, won to his self¬ 
less viewpoint by contemplation of his cross. 
This loyalty has been manifested in every region 
of the pursuit of truth: at the Reformation, 
chiefly in religion; of late, chiefly in science. The 
glory of science is the whole-hearted devotion of 
the scientist to the truth: announcing new dis¬ 
coveries with candor, however they may traverse 
the cherished prejudice of others; accepting new 
discoveries in his own field with humility, how¬ 
ever they may contravene his most cherished 
hypotheses. It seems to me not too much to say 
that Jesus was the first scientist. Of course, I 
do not mean anything so absurd as that he was 
the first to explore natural phenomena by the 
scientific method, or even that he ever did such a 
thing. Doubtless Aristotle, in our occidental 
tradition, deserves that place of honor. It was 
the rediscovery of Aristotle’s method at the 
Renaissance which gave to modern science its 
technique. But Aristotle was a comfortable dil¬ 
ettante, a mere amateur of the sciences. Jesus 
was a martyr for the truth. The technique of 
modern science comes from Aristotle. But the 
emotional drive which has made men employ that 


212 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


technique derives from the rediscovery at the 
Reformation of Jesus’ loyalty to truth, as Lu¬ 
ther exemplified it, in the very spirit of the cross, 
at the Diet of Worms, whither he fared with 
head high and heart bold, though he knew that 
for him, as for John Huss at Constance a cen¬ 
tury earlier despite a similar imperial safe- 
conduct, the stake probably was waiting. 

If thus the typical attitude of science, in which 
our modern time greatly hopes, is supremely il¬ 
lustrated and commended in the example of 
Jesus, there is also to be found in that example a 
first hint of democracy, not as the Athenian 
politicasters had known it, but as we know and 
love it in the twentieth century. For the cross 
was an appeal over the heads of the governing 
classes to the judgment of the common people. 
Jesus knew that the verdict of the common 
people, when once by the cross their interest had 
been aroused in his message to the point of rec¬ 
ognizing its truth, would be for him and against 
his enemies. And he was willing to abide the 
decision of the court of Demos, with a sublime 
confidence in the rectitude of ultimate human 
judgment. Thus it may be said that Jesus’ ac¬ 
ceptance of the cross, when he might perhaps 
have resisted it, or certainly have evaded it, is 
the first and greatest charter of popular govern¬ 
ment. 


NON-RESISTANCE 


213 


Further, in the provision Jesus had made, by 
training his Apostles as his representatives after 
he was gone, for the instruction of the popular 
mind in the meaning of the cross and his min¬ 
istry, there is to be seen a recognition of the 
importance of education to a sound public opin¬ 
ion. Every teacher of truth as a platform for 
social action is in the apostolic succession, 
whether or no his head have been blessed by a 
bishop, or his rostrum be a pulpit. 

So three of the ascendant emphases in modern 
humanitarian aspiration and effort are to be 
found illustrated in the cross of Christ: the sci¬ 
entific attitude of utter and uncompromising 
loyalty to the truth; faith in the final wisdom of 
the popular verdict; provision for the instruction 
of the jury, so to speak, by an educational sys¬ 
tem. But the meaning of the cross, in this re¬ 
spect, comes home more closely to each of us. It 
is an invitation, as urgent as the pains of the 
Crucified, to rest our confidence in persuasion 
rather than in force, and to dedicate our per¬ 
sonal allegiance to the high and supernatural 
cause of the truth, which is the intellectual phase 
of the right, to the total disregard of selfish aims 
envisaging the vanities of comfort and success 
on the commodity-standard which our animal 
nature applies to the measurement of life. No 
man who looks at the cross long enough really 


214 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


to see its meaning can resist the imperative con¬ 
viction that truth is and must be held supreme, 
as Jesus held it. 

Nay, the meaning of the cross comes home to 
us more closely even than this. For, in contem¬ 
plating the heroism of this loyalty, we cannot 
overlook the truth which this loyalty subserved. 
That truth—Jesus saw it as an axiom, obvious, 
irresistible when once it had been seen and recog¬ 
nized and understood: “Our Father, who art 
in heaven,” or, as we have paraphrased it: “The 
Spirit of the universe is conscious and compe¬ 
tent good will.” Is it true? No man can prove 
it. But no man who has grasped it can disbelieve 
it. No man can prove, either, that a straight 
line is the shortest distance between two points. 
But try to disbelieve it if you will! You and I 
know, though we know not how we know, that 
Jesus’ key-text is the heart of all truth. When 
we meditate upon it, deep answers unto deep, 
and our hearts rise up within us to hail with re¬ 
joicing the final solution of the mystery of being. 

But what we hail we must also heed. When 
we heed it, we shall find our lives emptied of fear 
and filled with gladness, turned from sin and 
tending toward righteousness. How shall we 
heed it? Behold the cross! It blazons forth a 
dynamic conviction, as all the trumpets of all 
God’s angels could not herald it. In the cross 


NON-RESISTANCE 


215 


of Christ we glory, because it towers eternally 
over the wrecks of time at the center of human 
experience, the focus of interest in a truth peren¬ 
nially new and revolutionizing, calling up from 
the depths of our being the will and the power 
to live by its light. 


XVIII 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


My kingdom is not of this world .—St. John 18:36 

Jesus was a king. There was no doubt in the 
mind of any one who knew him but that as a king 
he bore himself, and in him inhered an intrinsic 
authority. But what might be the nature of this 
authority was a baffling problem. It was not 
wholly due to voluntary misrepresentation that 
he was finally put on trial for his life on the 
charge of sedition, as though by his pretensions 
to royalty he contemplated a political role as 
the exponent of nationalistic Messianism. It 
was in part at least due to genuine perplexity as 
to his claims that this fatal mistake was made. 
For in the thought-circle of his time no other 
form of kingship was comprehensible save in 
presidency over a State. The State, as then, so 
at many times subsequently, has seemed to most 
men to be an end in itself; indeed, the supreme 
end of human existence. Hegel erected this view 
into his theory of the State supreme and irre¬ 
sponsible; and it is still the key-note of the com¬ 
mon conception of patriotism. But Jesus was 
216 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


217 


not interested in the State as an end. He was 
indifferent to the details of political constitution 
and administration. Among types of civic gov¬ 
ernment, his spirit would indeed probably en¬ 
dorse some as relatively better than others; but 
only on the score of their instrumental efficiency 
in promoting the authentic interests of humanity, 
which far transcend the plane of politics. 

Jesus, though he disavowed all political aims, 
was put to death for treason to Csesar. Almost 
as soon as the impression of his personality began 
to fade in their memories, his followers under¬ 
took to found in his behalf a kingdom of this 
world of another type, which they called “the 
Church.” For the Church they devised, in rapid 
development of its polity, a monarchical hier¬ 
archy corresponding to a political peerage in its 
degrees, and a sacramental system, to the ma¬ 
terial symbols of which such quasi-magical effi¬ 
cacy was attributed as to render it the equivalent 
of a scheme of civil government. Against the 
Church, made and marred by men for their own 
advantage, masquerading under the name of 
Christ, a great division of Christendom broke 
away in successful rebellion at the Reformation. 
But Protestantism has nevertheless carried on to 
a lamentable extent the old notion, still asserted 
by Rome, that the Church is Christ’s earthly 
kingdom, with final and exclusive jurisdiction 


218 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


over the faith and morals of all mankind, obedi¬ 
ence to which in all its enactments is therefore 
essential to salvation. Since faith may be inter¬ 
preted as determining all beliefs, and morals as 
including all conduct, this amounts to a claim of 
unqualified control over all human affairs. But 
Jesus was not more interested in a kingdom of 
this world to be called a Church than in a king¬ 
dom of this world to be called a kingdom. 
Doubtless he would admit that religious organi¬ 
zation is as necessary as civic organization, so 
that there must be a Church or Churches; but, 
again, as in the case of States, his favor would 
be distributed among them on the ground of their 
relative instrumental efficiency in promoting the 
authentic interests of humanity, rather than for 
their own sake as ends in themselves. 

Most of us, with minds trained in modern 
learning, see the fallacy of claiming for State or 
Church any imprescriptible authority. But we 
still seek to gain the end which Jesus sought, 
the deliverance of mankind from all kinds of evil, 
by analogous methods; namely, through organi¬ 
zation. We have a mania for organization. 
Whenever one of us gets an improving idea, he 
straightway starts a society to propagate it; and 
begins to feel that his cause is won when consti¬ 
tution and by-laws have been duly engrossed, 
and a president, a secretary and a treasurer have 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


219 


been regularly elected. Missionary societies, 
political clubs, labor unions, manufacturers’ asso¬ 
ciations, the Anti-Saloon League, the League of 
Nations—doubtless these are all good and useful 
associations; but to suppose, as many enthusi¬ 
asts apparently do, that salvation is a matter 
primarily of successful organization, in any of 
the fields in which we may need it, is nothing 
other than to try to set up new kingdoms of this 
world for Christ. And he wants no kingdom of 
this world. Not that he would not endorse and 
favor any organization actually serviceable for a 
legitimate humanitarian end; but that he has no 
faith or interest in organizations for their own 
sake. 

A fourth error concerning our Lord’s king- 
ship comes about by way of extreme reaction 
from all this worldliness of identifying his cause 
with the State, the Church, or any earthly organ¬ 
ization. We are invited to believe that, because 
his kingdom is not of this world, it must there¬ 
fore be of the next world, the world to which 
the redeemed will go after death; and that there 
they will behold their Savior robed in regal 
splendor, crowned and enthroned in dazzling 
majesty, supervising the business of the uni¬ 
verse, and preparing to return to our planet 
panoplied in radiant might as Judge of all the 
earth. Now that Jesus still lives, that his spirit 


220 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


is emancipated from the limitations of time and 
space, that he is everywhere and effectively pres¬ 
ent with his servants as the captain of our sal¬ 
vation, I do most firmly believe. But that in 
any world he who in this world despised and re¬ 
jected the futile insignia of vainglorious rank 
would covet and appropriate these insignia I can¬ 
not at all suppose. For that implies a deplorable 
change in his heart and disposition. However 
justifiable the apocalyptic imagery of Scriptures 
and creeds may be to kindle in the minds of the 
faithful a poetic appreciation of our Lord’s 
actual supremacy, it must not be taken literally. 
For, wherever his spirit is operative, it must still 
be consistent with his spirit when his crown was 
of thorns and his throne was a cross. He 
has not stopped serving and sacrificing and 
begun to reign. He reigns by serving and sacri¬ 
ficing. 

What, then, was and is Christ’s kingdom, if 
it be neither a political State under his sway, nor 
an earthly Church in his name, nor any crusad¬ 
ing organization, nor courts of gold and por¬ 
phyry in the sky? Christ’s kingdom is the realm 
of the ideal. If that sounds vague and abstract 
to us, it is because we fail to appreciate the tre¬ 
mendous and terrible potency of ideals. An 
ideal is an idea infused with a moral dynamic; 
and ideas are of vastly more weight and moment 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


221 


than things, even in practical affairs. Ideals are 
the things really worth living for. They are 
vital values, in striking contrast to the market 
values which this thoughtless world holds dear. 
Jesus’ subjects are they who live, as he lived, for 
these vital values, for things not purchasable 
with gold, but only with the coin of character. 
And all who choose this spiritual currency recog¬ 
nize upon it Christ’s image and superscription, 
and cannot but acclaim him as sovereign of the 
realm of the ideal, to which their souls render 
allegiance. 

Now, while Jesus cares naught for kingdoms 
of this world, the whole purpose of his ministry 
and Gospel is to set up his spiritual kingdom— 
the realm of the ideal—in ascendancy over this 
world. If we have rightly gauged the crass and 
gross materialism of most of the inhabitants of 
this planet in our own and all earlier times, we 
must acknowledge that to win this ascendancy 
is an enormous undertaking. But who ever sup¬ 
posed that the cause of Christ could be lightly 
won? He had to die, to start it on its way; mul¬ 
titudes have died since his death, to keep it going 
forward; the end is not yet, nor will it come soon. 
But Jesus’ approach to kingship over men is 
through the individual. It is as individuals learn 
of him to live for the things that really count, 
that the world will be brought onward toward the 


222 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


heavenly allegiance. So Christianity, despite all 
its social implications, has to do primarily with 
the individual, with you and me, that we may live 
aright. 

Now let us note some of the facts about 
Christ’s kingdom—the realm of the ideal—which 
differentiate it from the kingdoms of this world. 
First, the kingdoms of this world require of their 
subjects acceptance of things as they are. The 
king rules by divine right; or, the constitution is 
the last word in political wisdom: to question 
that dogma is to invite suspicion of one’s loyalty. 
There is also in every land a patriotic mythology 
which must be swallowed whole: in all our wars 
our side was always right; all our heroes were 
immaculate, and all the enemies’ corrupt; Wil¬ 
liam the Conqueror was England’s benefactor, 
Victoria was a great and good queen, or Wash¬ 
ington was the greatest general and most im¬ 
peccable Christian in history, and Lincoln a 
nineteenth-century Messiah. To be sure, some 
of us do apply the higher criticism to such dogma 
and mythology, but most of our compatriots are 
very sure that such of us as do are disloyal. Now 
I am well aware that similar standards of recti¬ 
tude through literal acceptance of codes, formu¬ 
las and hagiologies have been repeatedly set up 
by the Church in Christ’s name, as tests of alle¬ 
giance to him. But he did not set them up. He 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


223 


neither accepted old authorities for more than 
they were actually worth, nor did he set up a new 
authority which must be accepted on faith with¬ 
out scrutiny. The one fundamental principle of 
access to Jesus’ kingdom, the domain of vital 
values, is that a man be never content with things 
as they are, but be ever in quest of higher and 
clearer revelations of the right and the true. 

Again, the kingdoms of this world exact obedi¬ 
ence of all whom they control—who are called 
subjects, indeed, because they are under subjec¬ 
tion to an external compulsion to conform with 
the State’s requirements. But in Christ’s king¬ 
dom bonds are loosed, the prisoners of law are 
set free, and a man no longer has to do what he 
does not want to do, but can do just as he pleases. 
Of course that sounds anarchic; and, when this 
clause of the constitution of Christ’s kingdom 
is promulgated without its context, anarchy does 
result. But he who has complied with the pre¬ 
requisites for admission to the jurisdiction of the 
ideal, under Christ as his Sovereign—that is, who 
has decided to live for the things really worth 
living for, and who is engaged in an eager and 
unremitting quest of the right and the true— 
cannot possibly want to do what under just and 
reasonable law he ought not to do. For external 
compulsion, however, is substituted the internal 
propulsion of a love of righteousness; and that 


224 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


is freedom. For to be free does not mean to do 
wrong without interference, since that brings a 
man into slavery to sin; but to do right by one’s 
own choice, since that brings a man out on a 
higher level, with a wider range, of confident and 
joyous experience. 

This substitution of love for law as the prin¬ 
ciple of control within Christ’s kingdom is par¬ 
alleled by substitution of persuasion for force in 
the conquests of his kingdom. The kingdoms 
of this world carry on their conquests in arms. 
David, whose successor Jesus was alleged to have 
claimed to be, was a warrior extending the 
bounds of his empire by the ruthless advance of 
his armies. Caesar, against whom Jesus’ alleged 
Davidic claim was taken to be an offense, was 
pushing out the limits of Rome’s territories with 
a mailed fist. But Jesus scorned conquest by 
legions, whether of Romans or of angels; it was 
by the light of reason and the warmth of his good 
will that he sought to attach men to himself, and 
he would not stoop to conquer them on any other 
terms. To be sure, the Church has often blessed 
wars, and almost as often inspired and fought 
wars. But not so Christ. His is ever the power 
of truth and love only, by his own choice. He 
who has learned of Christ what are the vital val¬ 
ues of life can never willingly take the sword, for 
he knows that in the long run the sword is im- 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


225 


potent, while truth and love are omnipotent. 

There remains a further telling contrast, 
which comes home with especial force to us in 
this flamboyant age, between the kingdoms of 
this world and Christ’s kingdom, the realm of 
the ideal. The kings of this world are greedy to 
get, that they may indulge in display; and of 
their servitors those commonly achieve first rank 
who, like these princes, get all they can, by any 
means available, and spend all they can in ex¬ 
travagant splendor of selfish ostentation. That 
is a procedure which we understand all too well; 
we feel the pull of its attraction. To make 
money, and to keep up appearances—these are 
the passionate urges which have superseded 
ideals in many Americans today. But Jesus 
came not to be ministered unto but to minister. 
He said: “He that would be greatest among 
you, let him be your servant.” His whole life 
was one of giving, until he gave his life itself on 
Calvary. And almost every time he opened his 
lips he warned his hearers against greed and 
vanity. The man who has thought things 
through far and clearly enough to discern what 
are the things really worth living for, finds these 
warnings written on his own heart in letters of 
fire. Not to get, but to give; not to squander on 
self, but to consecrate one’s substance in helping 
others—this tribute of spontaneous and unlim- 


226 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


ited generosity Christ the Eternal King pays to 
his subjects, and asks them to distribute it in his 
name in the world, instead of grinding the face 
of the poor to fill their coffers, as do the kings of 
this world. 

What a wonderful day it will be when Christ’s 
kingdom, the realm of the ideal, the domain of 
vital values, is ascendant on the earth! Love 
will have cast out fear; the persuasions of reason 
will have conquered the resistance of stubborn 
error in every field of human concern; the spirit 
of brotherhood will have leveled the excesses of 
riches and poverty as no egalitarian legislation 
could of itself conceivably do. It will not mat¬ 
ter, then, what forms the institutions of society 
may assume, what laws may be on the statute- 
books. For not by legal devices will mankind’s 
deliverance from evil have been wrought, but by 
a new spirit—the true human spirit which is at 
the same time divine—come to manifestation in 
the general conduct. 

But what chance is there that such a consum¬ 
mation will ever be achieved? Is it conceivable 
that humanity in general can ever be made deep, 
careful and sincere enough in mind to decide de¬ 
liberately to put ideals in control of all living, as 
they were in control of Christ’s life? Perhaps 
not. We need not wait, however, until society 
in general is raised to this level. For, under 


NOT OF THIS WORLD 


227 


every form of government, it is always a thought¬ 
ful minority which controls. Our trouble just 
now is that the minority in control takes thought 
chiefly for its own advantage. It is to change 
this situation that the Gospel is in the world. 
When there are enough Christians—a clear¬ 
headed, aggressive, compact minority, not for 
the polemic vindication of dogma but for the 
irenic promotion of moral sanity—to hold the 
balance of power in determining social policies, 
then the masses will follow suit, and society will 
take its tone from Christian idealism, which 
from that point on will propagate itself by the 
contagion of this salutary example. 

Great progress has already been made. It is 
a changed world in which we live from the world 
in which Jesus lived: not only or chiefly in the 
external appurtenances of civilization; but in the 
humanitarian spirit—the generous idealism— 
which, despite its many deficiencies, current so¬ 
ciety does increasingly emphasize. I do not sup¬ 
pose that moral idealism will conquer the world 
by its benign persuasions in any near generation 
or early century; but that conquest is going for¬ 
ward. Christ is its Commander. His authority 
lies in the fact that he incarnates the ideal before 
our eyes, and by his love commends it to our 
hearts. If you and I will seek the right and the 
true, and will put love above law and giving 


228 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


above getting as Jesus did, then we shall find 
ourselves living in Christ’s kingdom, which is not 
of this world, and helping to bring the kingdoms 
of this world under his beneficent sway. 


XIX 


LOYALTY 


One thing I do. —Philippians 3:13 


This is, I believe, the shortest text from which 
I have ever preached. In the original Greek it 
consists of two words only, of two letters each. 
Yet it strikes me as one of the most significant 
in Holy Writ, as sounding the essential note for 
that type of life which is in the best sense suc¬ 
cessful. 

Our first thought, upon considering these 
words, amid the manifold duties of our compli¬ 
cated modern living, may well be one of envious 
comparison of the innumerable demands upon 
our time and attention with the good old days 
when it was possible, as St. Paul seems to 
assure us here, to do one thing only; and pre¬ 
sumably, therefore, to do that one thing thor¬ 
oughly. Every one of us has so many things to 
do, if he would hold his place and vindicate his 
right to existence in our strenuous age, that 
most of the things we undertake must of neces¬ 
sity be but half done. If only the pressure were 
less intense, and our careers could be simplified, 

229 


230 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


how much more competent we should be, and 
how much more we should enjoy our work! But 
of what avail can it be to hold up such a maxim 
as this as an ideal, in a day when obligations are 
of inescapable necessity multiplied to such an 
extent that to follow this maxim literally is 
obviously impossible? 

An answer to that objection will, however, 
suggest itself to all who are acquainted with the 
actual circumstances of the Apostle who thus 
declares, “One thing I do.” For St. Paul had 
as complex a career, with as varied claims upon 
his interest and ingenuity, as any modern man. 
He is best known to us as a writer—the first of 
the great theologians of the Christian Church, 
whose teachings, however obsolete in some of 
their aspects, still remain so striking a record of 
searching reflection upon an authentic and ex¬ 
alted spiritual experience as to be perennially 
cogent for our instruction. But he was also a 
preacher, to vast multitudes of many nations— 
which is quite another matter from the composi¬ 
tion of philosophical treatises. He was, further, 
a general superintendent and administrator of 
ecclesiastical affairs, discharging executive func¬ 
tions of incalculable importance and value to the 
Churches throughout a wide area, and doing so 
with singular tact and efficiency. Moreover, in 
order thus to preach and to administer, he was 


LOYALTY 


231 


a traveler over most of the roads of the wide 
Roman Empire. And, that his support and the 
expenses of his journeys might not be a charge 
upon these early adherents of the Gospel, who in 
the things of this world were as a rule the poorest 
of the poor, he earned his own livelihood and 
way by working with his hands as a tentmaker. 
Thus we know that he was regularly engaged in 
no less than five distinct enterprises; and doubt¬ 
less others also might be enumerated. How then 
could a man whose occupations rivaled if they 
did not surpass our own in variety and urgency, 
claim that to one thing his energies were con¬ 
stantly devoted? 

Clearly this one thing cannot have been one 
type of activity. It must, then, have been one 
purpose, infusing the whole range of his diffuse 
efforts and uniting them together into a solidar¬ 
ity of aim and consciousness. But unity of 
endeavor, in this sense, is as attainable in the 
twentieth century as in the first, and will always 
continue to be the mark of a life well conducted 
and broadly serviceable. 

A radical difference in character results from 
two contrasted orders of unifying purpose. If 
a man defines his aim within the limitations of 
his own interest, he will be a man of a different 
sort from him whose purpose transcends self, 
seeking to render generous service to some in- 


232 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


terest greater and more enduring than his own 
earthly life. Yet even a firm and persistent self¬ 
ishness, with a relatively remote aim replacing 
the sensations of the passing moment as its goal, 
produces a better result than the mere indulgence 
of impulses and following of whimsies in which 
many people dissipate their powers. A few 
months ago I met again a young man whom I 
had not seen for more than ten years. When I 
had last known him, he was a wastrel, amiable 
and attractive but weak, foul of habit, and unde¬ 
pendable as to his intentions. When I met him 
again, I felt as though I were encountering a 
total stranger; for in the long interval of our sep¬ 
aration he had become a successful business man 
—clean, competent, unquestionably straight (as 
I believe) in financial matters, and rendering a 
real service to the community through his single- 
minded devotion to the business in which he is 
engaged. He is not only changed almost be¬ 
yond recognition by having embraced a clear-cut 
ambition to accumulate a fortune and become a 
powerful figure in the commercial world, but is 
also undeniably a much better man than he was 
before. Yet I find myself, when I think of him, 
regretting this salutary alteration; for some¬ 
thing good has gone from his soul—a gentleness, 
a friendliness, which made his personality far 
more ingratiating in the past than it is now. He 


LOYALTY 


233 


has grown hard, cold, and aloof in a detached 
and calculating dedication of all his capacities 
to his own advantage. His every thought bears 
the dollar sign. He chose well in deciding to 
focus his scattered impulses upon one central 
aim; but, alas, he made the grievous mistake of 
not looking beyond himself when he defined that 
aim. 

The consequences are equally unsatisfactory, 
moreover, when a selfish motive of a more re¬ 
fined order is entertained. For instance, to seek 
breadth and depth of intelligence, merely for 
the satisfaction and honor to be won thereby, 
rather than as an instrument for more effective 
service, produces a rigid, frigid cast of person¬ 
ality, conceited and pedantic; not prone, to be 
sure, to be vicious, but assuredly the reverse of 
magnetic or deserving of gratitude and remem¬ 
brance. 

There is no need to specify that it was not 
himself whom St. Paul sought to serve when 
he yielded his life to one dominant purpose. 
The Apostle to the Gentiles stands in history 
as the type of man who subordinates self to a 
loftier and temporally more enduring object of 
his devotion. When to such objects of our de¬ 
votion we offer only the passive tribute of our 
admiration or affection, that mood corresponds 
to the commonly accepted sense of the word 


234 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


“love,” which in general usage is rather a weak 
term. But when, in expression of our love, we 
pour forth the energies of our being in a con¬ 
centrated profusion of generous and sacrificial 
service, so that our deeds translate our thoughts 
into reality, then the best of English words to 
describe this mood, at once more practical and 
more honorable, is “loyalty.” And it is loyalty 
—that is, an effective consecration of our lives 
to the service of an end bigger than ourselves— 
which alone can give dignity and beauty to our 
souls. The hagiology of the Church, the roll of 
the world’s heroes, and our own observation in 
the humbler circles of our immediate acquaint¬ 
ance, are unanimous in confirming the conviction 
that in proportion to a man’s loyalty are the 
strength, the charm, and the influence of his 
manhood. 

Wide is the range of possible objects for such 
loyalty. Most conspicuous, perhaps, in this 
range, stands loyalty to principle. That man 
has already gone far toward the acquisition of 
the higher personal integrity whose aim it is, in 
every aspect and relationship of his existence, to 
do the right and to follow the truth. Many are 
the beguiling errors to which we would like to 
cleave, in preference to truths often uncomfort¬ 
able and depressing to the natural sense; but the 
man of principle forswears the blandishments 


LOYALTY 


235 


of illusion in stern commitment to the accurate 
and dependable. Many are the pleasant sins 
into which men slip easily, and for which it is 
not hard to find plausible excuse; but the man of 
principle cares not for weak excuses, or the per¬ 
verse encouragements of an indulgent public 
opinion, or even for the shelter of complete con¬ 
cealment; he will do right, in spite of men and 
devils. 

Yet there is something harsh and repellent— 
a lack of geniality and human feeling—about 
mere loyalty to principle, so that they who unify 
their lives upon this first level of noble aspira¬ 
tion appear rather as monuments of repression 
than as heroes of righteousness. A further step 
on the way of enduring spiritual attainment is 
to give one’s loyalty to some altruistic cause. It 
is under the leadership of the devotees of causes, 
even when these causes have been short-sightedly 
conceived, that our race has been led upon the 
path of social progress. For, even though the 
reform advocated by such devotees be inade¬ 
quate, or ill advised, yet the urgency of their 
championship of its program, and consequently 
of their indictment of the evils it is designed 
to remedy, will force upon public attention the 
need for improvement in the matters thus 
brought into the foreground, and betterment 
will then presently be almost inevitably brought 


236 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


to pass. And when the cause thus advocated 
is actually a just and imperative one, above the 
intelligent criticism of the well disposed, as in 
the cases, for instance, of the movements against 
slavery, the liquor traffic, political and economic 
discrimination against women, and child labor, 
how splendid are the results to the common¬ 
wealth of the fearless dedication of their spon¬ 
sors to these causes; how radiantly do their 
characters shine in the grateful recollection of 
posterity; how worthy they are to be numbered 
among the immortally blessed servants of God! 

But a worthy cause ministers, as we have 
seen, to the well-being of society. Therefore 
loyalty to the common interests of mankind, 
broadly conceived and perspicaciously pursued, 
is even higher, because more balanced and com¬ 
prehensive, than the advocacy of any single 
ameliorative movement. Thus it is that loyalty 
is more clearly associated for us, and seems to 
us more admirable, in connection with a human 
group than with any idea however reasonable 
and exalted. To be sure, loyalty of this sort has 
sometimes suffered deplorable perversions; as 
when loyalty to the Church has issued in oppres¬ 
sive bigotry, or loyalty to a nation has issued in 
arrogant, aggressive, militaristic nationalism. 
But in both these instances, and others like them, 
the initial impulse of devotion is admirable; its 


LOYALTY 


237 


lamentable outcome is due to an irrational pro¬ 
vincialism of purview. For no Churches, on a 
fair understanding of their functions, are rivals 
one of another; and no nations can safely profit 
at one another’s expense. The Churches and the 
nations of the world can and must work together 
for their own higher good and that of humanity. 
For all who have grasped the basic truth of 
human unity, and who have patience for the 
long process through diversity by means of 
which alone that unity can be actualized, will 
comprehend that the varying traditions and 
organizations of society sacred and secular have 
mutually supplementary services to render to 
the human family as a whole, ministering in their 
peculiar ways to peculiar situations and temper¬ 
aments, but with a common and inclusive end in 
view—the fraternity of all creeds and races, 
united by common adoration of the All-Father. 
And this social loyalty, thus carried to its ulti¬ 
mate term, is the dominant note of current 
ethical idealism, imparting to the nobler and 
finer souls or our time a humanitarian zeal 
which no bitter embroilments of sectarians or 
soldiers can quench or dampen. 

But how is one to maintain this wide-viewed 
humanitarianism, and at the same time keep his 
feet so firmly on the ground as to make it practi¬ 
cally effective? Certainly not by closeted 


238 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


dreaming of the ultimate phase of historic 
human unity, some centuries or millennia hence. 
Rather by realizing that the Church, the nation, 
and the all-inclusive human group, are alike 
made up of individuals, and by sustaining this 
broader loyalty to all mankind upon an uncom¬ 
promising loyalty to the individuals in our own 
limited circles. The finest of all loyalties under 
heaven, fundamental to these other types of de¬ 
votion which we have been considering, is the 
loyalty of friend to friend—bearing in mind, in 
making this assertion, that friendship is the es¬ 
sence of all intimate human relations. And 
many a man whose thoughts are not large 
enough to conceive principle, or a cause, or an 
institution, or humanity, as an abstraction or 
generalization, has at one step reached the essen¬ 
tial point by practicing utter fidelity in his per¬ 
sonal relations. For this, at least, we all can 
understand; and this we all can do, though not 
always easily. We have not learned the mean¬ 
ing of loyal friendship until w T e have discovered 
the possibility of loving our friends, and stead¬ 
fastly seeking to serve them, even though they 
hurt us; of taking a tenderly protective attitude, 
instead of one of resentment and retaliation, 
when their faults are displayed at our expense. 
The way to have friends is to be a friend. The 
way to be a friend is to forget one’s self in con- 


LOYALTY 


239 


stant remembrance of one’s associates and their 
needs, in unwavering intention to help them and 
bless them. And he who is a true friend cannot 
fail of dignity and beauty of character, or to 
grow into the larger dimensions of more compre¬ 
hensive loyalties. 

But we have not yet defined the essence of 
St. Paul’s loyalty. He was a true friend; he 
cared supremely for the Church and for the 
world’s redemption; his cause was that of the 
Gospel; his principles were those of righteous¬ 
ness and truth. But all these lesser devotions 
were subsumed and amalgamated in a sublime 
and central loyalty of his heart to the Lord 
Jesus Christ. For Christ is a man, and all men’s 
friend; his task is the world’s redemption; his 
is every cause in promotion of social progress; 
in him the principles of eternal being are ren¬ 
dered luminous to our understanding. I doubt 
whether humanitarian zeal could long be main¬ 
tained against the discouragements of actual 
human degeneracy and obliquity if it were not 
grounded generally in loyalty to Jesus, regarded 
as at least the consummate expression of general 
human potentialities, but sooner or later held by 
most who thus honor him to be also a transcript 
of the divine nature for man’s perusal. It was 
by the flame of this devotion to his Master and 
ours that St. Paul’s soul was cleansed of all 


240 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


self-seeking, and that his mind was enlightened 
for the faithful discharge of his complicated 
duties as elements of one dominant purpose, the 
service of God, and of man for God’s sake. 
And it is only by a like devotion, engaging the 
utmost ardor of our Lord’s deeds and nature, to 
the glory of his name, that we also can be lifted 
out of the vulgar treadmill of aimlessly selfish 
living to stand before men and in the presence 
of God as spirits emancipated and ennobled, re¬ 
flecting the radiance of the divine love. 

It is true that we have a great many things to 
do. But why are we doing them? Can we 
afford just to live from day to day, performing 
our manifest and inescapable functions as 
human beings, without any regnant spiritual 
urge to give drive and direction to our hap¬ 
hazard expenditure of life’s forces? Where shall 
we be, what shall we have accomplished, who 
will remember us, what shall we deserve at the 
hands of God our Judge, when we are through, 
if we do so? If we would make our lives count, 
would have our influence endure, would enable 
our souls to grow in our lesser ways, but after 
the same fashion as St. Paul, we too must focus 
our hopes, our desires and our efforts upon 
one coordinating sin. And in the choice of that 
aim we can do no better—I for one dare do no 
other—than did the great Apostle: the dedica- 


LOYALTY 


241 


tion of every thought and act to Christ, whom 
we love and who loves us, and by whose aid 
alone we shall be made strong to maintain our 
principles, to embrace and serve such important 
causes as should engage our direct cooperation, 
to promote the true interest of Church and na¬ 
tion, and in the intimate relations of our daily 
course to bring happiness to our associates by 
the outpouring of the serene grace of our con¬ 
sistent, and if need be self-immolating, conse¬ 
cration to their peace and welfare. 


XX 


TOLERANCE 

Refrain from these men, and let them alone; if then this 
counsel or this work he of men it will be overthrown: hut 
if it is of God, ye will not he able to overthrow them; lest 
haply ye he found even to he fighting against God. 

—Acts 5:38, 39 

Gamaliel was the greatest of the masters of 
Hebrew theology in the first century, and had 
been St. Paul’s teacher. In the advice he 
gave the Sanhedrin concerning the preaching of 
St. Peter and his associates, he afforded not 
only to the leaders of his own people in his own 
time, but to all the world in every age, a striking 
example of broad-mindedness and tolerance. 
We must remember that Gamaliel had no inside 
information as to the peculiar and supreme ve¬ 
racity of the Gospel. To him the apostolic mes¬ 
sage was but the aftermath of a popular 
religious movement already, by the execution of 
its leader, placed under public ban as seditious. 
Nevertheless he maintained that the questions 
raised by the Apostles ought to be answered by 
spokesmen of orthodox Israel in an academic 
manner, so to speak, rather than by recourse 

242 


TOLERANCE 


243 


to police measures. We may well wish that not 
only the opponents but also the representatives 
of Christian faith might always be like-minded. 
There would be far less needless strife in the 
world if decisions as to final truth were left 
peaceably to time, which tests all things, in lieu 
of the recurring attempts to establish them pre¬ 
maturely by forcible means. 

The first quality which we remark in Gamaliel, 
as he thus stands forth in advocacy of merciful 
fair dealing with supposititious heretics, is gen¬ 
erosity. This trait, in this and other manifesta¬ 
tions, is the prime index of a noble soul. 
Though we ourselves are sometimes tempted to 
harshness, yet when we stand aside to observe 
others in like situations we cannot but feel that 
calumny and persecution as defences of the faith 
are employed only by mean and petty minds, 
whereas superior intelligence and integrity are 
alike attested by a tone of courteous forbear¬ 
ance. 

But, on second thought, quite as striking as 
his generosity is Gamaliel’s common sense. For, 
after all, if we believe that there is such a thing 
as absolute truth—that is to say, exact corre¬ 
spondence of human opinion with ultimate real¬ 
ity—we cannot doubt but that opinions at 
variance with reality must, when allowed full and 
free expression, sooner or later be disproved by 


244 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


facts. In the realm of politics, the protection of 
non-violent minorities in their right to their own 
views is the distinguishing mark of democracy, 
the most advanced and idealistic, and at the same 
time destined, as I believe, to prove itself the 
most practicable, of governmental forms. In 
the realm of religion likewise we must come to 
the concept of a commonwealth of truth-seekers, 
in which all varieties of dissent from the preva¬ 
lent views are and of right ought to be regarded 
as ministering in the end to the sanity and se¬ 
curity of general enlightenment. 

The first reason why all shades of belief 
should be tolerated is an ethical one. For dig¬ 
nity and beauty of character are only to be had 
on condition of whole-hearted loyalty to some 
end of personal service, transcending the limita¬ 
tions of self-interest. And the most significant 
and valuable of such ends, because going deeper 
and including more within its scope than any 
other, is religious faith. No doubt it is ab¬ 
stractly desirable that one faith only, and that 
of course the right one, be shared by all who 
address themselves honestly to the improvement' 
of life’s opportunities. But the fact is, and 
against it there is no wisdom in rebelling, that 
at the present stage of human development 
many faiths divide the allegiance of the right¬ 
eous. And a sympathetic observer of the charac- 


TOLERANCE 


245 


ters of men of many religions cannot fail to note 
that genuine devotion, even to what to us may 
seem reprehensible error, is in its effects upon 
the souls of those who entertain it the moral 
equivalent of a like earnest persuasion of a more 
defensible creed. So, since in fact all men do 
not think alike in matters of religion, we ought 
to rejoice when we find any man pursuing a 
course which leads to elevation of character by 
surrendering himself enthusiastically to any 
type of faith; since the world is inevitably made 
better by moral achievement in whatsoever 
devious ways it be attained, while our race is 
held back in its spiritual progress not by here¬ 
sies chiefly, but by frivolous and purposeless 
living. 

There are, however, three conditions which we 
are entitled to exact of those to whom we extend 
tolerance as to opinions which we deem subver¬ 
sive of accuracy. First, they must hold these 
subversive opinions honestly. That is, no man 
who respects the powers of the human mind 
can be indulgent of sham. There is a great deal 
of sham belief everywhere, in orthodox circles 
not less and perhaps (as I sometimes fear) even 
more than among dissenters from the tenets of 
the majority. The one service among many dis¬ 
services rendered the public by such noxious 
though brilliant journals as the American Mer- 


246 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


cury is that they take an honorable delight in 
exposing shams and puncturing poses. Most of 
us can remember periods of our own mental 
growth, perhaps in college days, when we es¬ 
poused unpopular views or causes by way of 
mere pretentious self-assertion. We deserved 
then no tolerance; and, fortunately for our sub¬ 
sequent advance toward sincerity, we usually 
encountered rude, ruthless and stingingly super¬ 
cilious correction. But, on the other hand, 
though it will seem surprising to the man who is 
imprisoned within the narrow circle of his own 
ideas, it is nevertheless true that utter sincerity 
is to be found in the ranks of believers in all the 
peculiar dogmas, whether outmoded or extrava¬ 
gantly novel, within the realm of religious 
theory. And toward such honesty—an authentic 
seeking after truth, however misguided—we 
must be generous, if we would justify our own 
claim to hold and express our opinions unmo¬ 
lested. 

The second requirement which we are entitled 
to exact is that he who professes religious views 
in contrast with our own take them seriously, 
and work with all his might at his religion, what¬ 
ever it may be. For it is only through consistent 
and energetic representation that the element 
of truth in any system of belief is made available 
for general adoption, and that the elements of 


TOLERANCE 


247 


error therein are brought into that overt conflict 
with facts by which they are destined to be dis¬ 
credited. He also serves the cause of truth, 
therefore, who vigorously propounds errors 
honestly held. So, if I may be permitted to 
illustrate from my pastoral experience, it has 
long been my practice in encountering religious 
vagaries among my people not to rebuke what 
I may deem their departures from the faith, but 
rather to encourage them to make the most of 
their new outlook, in order by experimentation 
to get all that it has for them, and perhaps the 
sooner to return to more normal states of mind. 
For instance, when, as occasionally happens, a 
parishioner informs me, with embarrassment oc¬ 
casioned by fear of my reproaches, that he has 
latterly become interested in Christian Science, 
I am not shocked outwardly, or even inwardly, 
or at all inclined to inveigh against this nascent 
attachment to a theological position which I per¬ 
sonally cannot accept. Instead, I ask at once: 
“Are you really working at it? Do you read 
your lesson-sermon every day?” For it is an 
insult alike to Christian Science and to Congre¬ 
gationalism for a Congregationalist to take up 
Christian Science unless he really means busi¬ 
ness. Again, when I talk with a man who de¬ 
clares himself a Catholic, I will not argue with 
him as to the cardinal tenet of his Church—the 


248 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


papal succession in the Petrine supremacy— 
which seems to me historically and logically un¬ 
tenable. But I do want to know: “Are you a 
practicing Catholic? Do you go regularly to 
confession and the Holy Communion ?” For 
there is no value at all that I can see in Catholi¬ 
cism, or for that matter in any other system, 
as a mere set of controversial assertions; but 
there may be very great value in earnest devo¬ 
tion to the offices even of that belated survival of 
illiberal medievalism, while there is assuredly no 
peace of heart for the man who is in belief hon¬ 
estly a Catholic and in action furtively a pagan. 

The third of these requirements is that they 
whom we cannot help deeming heretics extend 
to us a reciprocal indulgence corresponding in 
kind and degree to the tolerance we manifest 
toward them. The one error strictly intolerable, 
whether in religion or in any other region of 
inquiry, is the desire to employ physical force 
for the establishment of ideas. In our republic, 
we can and must tolerate all shades of radical¬ 
ism, so long as it is proposed to proceed in ac¬ 
cordance with the Constitution and the laws of 
the land toward the inauguration of a new po¬ 
litical or economic order; but we dare not and 
ought not to tolerate the advocacy of the violent 
overthrow of the existing order. Likewise, in 
religion, we can be on terms of friendship with 


TOLERANCE 


249 


all who will accept and respond to our friend¬ 
ship ; but any proposal to coerce opinion in sup¬ 
port of any creed, however correct, must find 
arrayed against it a coalition of all other creedal 
groups which participate in a confidence in truth 
itself strong enough to make them scornful of 
mere might. 

A second reason why tolerance should be ex¬ 
tended in matters of religion is intellectual in 
its nature. It has to do with the attitude of our 
minds toward the whole problem presented by 
competitive creeds. It is doubtless more honest, 
in view of our limited information, as well as 
more generous, not to try to determine on what 
intellectual ground Gamaliel advocated toler¬ 
ance toward the Apostles. But in general three 
different motives of this sort are found operative 
in producing a bearing of generous and frater¬ 
nal common sense toward all varieties of re¬ 
ligious conviction. 

First, some men are tolerant through indiffer¬ 
ence. Such men may or may not be nominally 
adherents of some one system of belief. In 
either case they feel inwardly that on these sub¬ 
jects no one really knows or can know what is 
true; therefore they are not worth quarreling 
about. That agnostic mood is perhaps espe¬ 
cially prevalent in our time. Permit me, without 
arguing the question at length, simply to state 


250 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


that such indifference seems to me to be morally 
depressing and philosophically unjustifiable. 

A second motive of this sort may be a contemp¬ 
tuous condescension to the supposedly lower 
mental capacities of all who hold opinions differ¬ 
ing from ours. We express this idea when we 
say, as we often do, “He is doing the best he can 
by such light as he has.” But the test of toler¬ 
ance is its effect upon those to whom its courtesy 
is extended. True tolerance will make them 
grateful and happy, and go a long way toward 
inspiring them with a real regard for those who 
exercise it. But such tolerance as this is posi¬ 
tively infuriating. Therefore it is not true toler¬ 
ance at all. Would you like to be told that you 
are a Congregationalist because you do not 
know any better? Then how do you suppose a 
Catholic or a Christian Scientist (to revert to the 
examples already alluded to) will enjoy such 
an attitude on your part toward him? This 
arrogance has, moreover, of course, a deleterious 
effect upon the man himself who indulges in it. 
Contempt for men of other minds is occasioned 
by, and affords encouragement to, a monstrous 
conceit; and conceit is not, to say the least, a 
spiritual desideratum. 

The third and only right motive of an intellec¬ 
tual order for tolerance of divergencies in re¬ 
ligious opinion is a sense of humility, in candid 


TOLERANCE 


251 


acknowledgment that our minds also have limi¬ 
tations and probably do not grasp the truth with 
perfect clearness in its entirety, so that we wel¬ 
come contributions to our understanding of in¬ 
finite reality—the being and creation of God— 
from every quarter. This is not to say that we 
will compromise our own conviction, or attempt 
to hold simultaneously contradictory views on 
the same subject. But it does assert that there 
is some truth as well as some error in every 
creed, and that the perfect creed, combining all 
truths and eliminating all errors, has not yet been 
formulated. It will often happen, indeed, that 
the sympathetic student will find help and light 
in theological systems from which in the main he 
radically dissents. To revert again to our previ¬ 
ously cited instances: the root of Catholicism as 
an organic complex of doctrines is the dogma of 
Roman supremacy, which we cannot accept; but 
who can peruse the writings of the great Catholic 
theologians, or scrutinize the careers of some 
Catholic saints, or observe the learning and piety 
actually displayed today within that communion, 
without gaining fresh insight into the splendor of 
the Divine Being and the majesty of eternal 
truth, and a renewed inspiration to reverence and 
devotion? Again, from the denial by Christian 
Science of the substantive validity of pain we 
turn away repelled by what seems to us to be a 


252 


CHRISTIAN HUMANISM 


denial of all essential significance to the cross; 
but who can talk with a convinced Christian 
Scientist about his faith without admiring the 
practical and sustained awareness of the effec¬ 
tive presence of God in his life which such a 
believer usually enjoys, and which we are wont, 
to our inestimable loss, not to cultivate? Thus 
it seems to me that the ultimate ground of our 
tolerance of religious differences should be a 
modest and open-minded admission that of them 
who seek to know God all hold some truths and 
none hold all truths, so that the final harmony 
of creeds in a united Church, for which we hope 
when the Kingdom of God shall have come upon 
the earth, is best promoted by mutual friendli¬ 
ness and respect and a candid comparison of 
contrasting viewpoints. 

So the humility as to our own attainments 
thus far in the pursuit of truth, which underlies 
true tolerance, issues in an inspiring hopeful¬ 
ness. We can afford to be patient and brotherly 
amid the dissensions which mark this stage of 
religious progress, as the like of them have 
marked all stages hitherto; and we must seek, in 
constant expression of this attitude, to replace 
vain controversies with understanding and mu¬ 
tual esteem among the parties to them. For since 
God is one, and through Christ and all His lesser 
prophets is leading mankind toward unity with 


TOLERANCE 


253 


Him, the one truth will some day shine forth to 
enlighten all the ends of the earth; and that one 
truth, when it appears, will focus all the many- 
colored rays of our varying theological opinions 
in the white radiance of the Sun of Righteous¬ 
ness, at length dispelling every error, casting out 
every disease by the healing in its wings, and 
making clear in the sight of all men what now 
we see hut darkly looming through the mists 
of ignorance and prejudice, the brotherhood of 
mankind, as children of one Heavenly Father. 








































































































